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Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

All I can do is provide another anecdote, but I'm not sure how I'd provision servers without something like Docker. I guess there's ansible, but Docker is great since I can just put shell commands in the Dockerfile.

At work, we recently started using GitHub Codespaces for development. It uses Docker to set up the dev environment. It's been fantastic and legit has solved 99% of "works on my machine" problems.

What's causing your file-not-found issues? Surely it's not actually Docker, but rather some poorly written Dockerfiles.

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> I'm not sure how I'd provision servers

> I can just put shell commands in the Dockerfile.

Can't you just put the shell commands in a shell script?

You can do anything with a shell script, and typically you could use tools like Ansible to provision them - that would be similar to Docker's Dockerfile.

Unlike shell script, you generally need to build Docker image only once though + it just feels faster and less cumbersome.

I just use Docker whenever I need to run something on multiple machines. It essentially runs the same shell script, but I don't have to care for making sure the environment for the shell script is compatible (i.e. distribution version, os package dependencies and so on)

Are you deploying to servers that are already running other services? If so, why not just create a fresh VPS dedicated for your new deployment? Not saying either way is better or worse, just looking to understand why that may be the case.

Sure but then I have to make sure the commands work well for servers that are already half configured. With Dockerfiles, I can just be naive and write the scripts with the assumption that it's a fresh system every time.

Right, I can see your point but I just want to understand a bit more... why would some servers be half configured already? When you fire up a new server don't you just select a standard distro image? What happens when the Docker image is updated?

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