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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Yes, mostly I do. And I have not yet needed Docker to do this, though many people have argued that this is what Docker is for. I tried to point out how empty that argument was in "Docker is the dangerous gamble which we will regret":

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-is-a-dangerous...

When I need to run multiple database, or want a database with a copy of production data, then sometimes we run that remotely. Running a few servers that all developers can use seemed to be standard practice 10 years ago, but the practice seems to be in retreat, replaced by the notion of "Use Docker to run every service on your own machine." But I have not seen that Docker actually makes that easy to do, and if your team has a full-time devops person who can spin up some extra machines, then usually it saves the whole team a lot of time to simply rely on a few central servers that the devops person has set up for development.

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Any thoughts how to enforce consistent dev environment among the team mates?

Don't? I'm currently working on a Golang web app with a small team and we're lucky enough to be each working on separate modules that fulfill a predefined specification we drafted prior to starting a line of code. As long as each module fulfills the requirements we drafted, we don't care about each others dev environments, because go creates a binary.

Also: `go fmt` is incredible (and built in to literally every Golang environment). We used to work primarily in Node.js but since making the switch last year to Golang we've noticed an increase in code-review productivity. Everyone's code looks the same so we don't have to spend time worrying about dev environments.

> I have not seen that Docker actually makes that easy to do

docker-compose up -d

What’s not easy about that?

It's slow feedback loop when developing / testing / debugging. This of course depends on your tech stack, with dynamic language such as NodeJS it is actually quite good as you can just mount your code base to the container and when you edit files they are reloaded automatically.

However if your application docker container requires compilation and you need to restart docker compose once you make changes to the codebase (and/or want to run integration tests), the whole docker compose flow might add an extra minute or two to your feedback loop and slow down development.

In those cases I'd rather run everything locally (still would include docker-compose.yaml file for developers who prefer that and are not comfortable running all required services locally).

Developing Go applications I have found my development flow much more agile without docker, docker was decreasing my productivity a bit so I stopped using it.

Our current integration test suite runs entirely through docker compose flow normally (in the CI or locally) but launching the integration test suite outside of docker, if you have all dependencies running locally, is quite faster and saves a lot of time, thus increasing my productivity.

I was referring to dependencies that you don’t work on yourself. For example, if you’re a front-end dev and there’s a bunch of microservices you want to have running, you can start them all in one command and get on with your job. No need to wait for anyone to spin up environments, refresh databases, etc.

Go here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-protects-a-pro...

And then scroll down to where you see this:

UPDATE 2018-07-09

And read that Slack conversation. That is a real conversation that actually happened. We lost 3 days trying to fix that bug, which in the end was a complex interplay of the Docker cache and the way the Dockerfile was written.

This is the sales pitch for Docker:

docker-compose up -d

But that Slack conversation is the reality.

This issue isn’t specific to Docker. Your tags should always be immutable.

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