What's the right way to set up a development environment on OS X with Docker?

Question

Intro

I can\'t figure out a good way to set up a development environment on OS X using Docker and Boot2Docker. The problem I\'m hitting is how to manage the source

Answer 1

I've been developing in a OS X (mid 2011 Macbook Air) + Boot2Docker + Docker-compose environment for a few weeks now. Haven't run into major performance issues but I avoid running any sort of build when developing (why not use something like jekyll serve --skip-initial-build?). Here's an example docker-compose.yml file I'm using:

docker-compose.yml:

test:
  build: .
  volumes:
    - ./client:/src/client
    - ./server:/src/server
    - ./test:/src/test
  command: nodemon --exec jasmine-node -- test/ --verbose --autotest --captureExceptions --color
  environment:
    - DEBUG=*

Dockerfile:

FROM node:0.12

RUN mkdir -p /src
WORKDIR /src

ENV PATH=/src/node_modules/.bin:$PATH

# We add package.json first so that we the
# image build can use the cache as long as the
# contents of package.json hasn't changed.

COPY package.json /src/
RUN npm install --unsafe-perm

COPY . /src

CMD [ "npm", "start" ]
EXPOSE 3000

I sometimes use NFS (http://syskall.com/using-boot2docker-using-nfs-instead-of-vboxsf/) but haven't noticed a big performance difference when doing so.

For me, the convenience of a simple docker-compose up test to get my environment running has been worth the cost in performance (I routinely work on multiple projects with different stacks).

PS: nodemon is one of the few file watchers which work with vboxsf (see https://github.com/remy/nodemon/issues/419).