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Comment by mmattax | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to use Kitematic as a way to get our non-CLI savvy designers up and running with our software stack on docker. They key feature missing IMO is the ability to "open" a docker-compose.yml file.

I want the ability for a designer to select "file open" and then select the docker-compose.yml file to "launch" our stack.

Without that, it seems like you still need to rely on the docker-cli to build images from a Dockerfile.

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You're using Docker Compose on Mac? I tried when it was still called Fig, and while it was wonderful for simplicity, the filesystem performance for VirtualBox/boot2docker made it brutal to use. My Rails apps in development mode (therefore serving up many individual assets) would take almost a minute to load each page.

Has it gotten better, is there a trick you're using, or am I hitting an edge case you don't have?

Yeah, the filesystem for VBox got significantly better (use to have to use a custom ISO to get volume shares to work properly).

We haven't had a problem since the Docker 1.3 update.

>would take almost a minute to load each page

VirtualBox filesystem performance isn't amazing, but it isn't anywhere near that bad. There was probably another issue involved here.

I really don't think so. You might just be underestimating the number of static asset files in a client-heavy web app before concat/minify ever happens. Watching the logs, you could see... each... little... file... take... way too long.

No, we ran into the same issues. When dealing with mid-sized Node.js projects in particular where the dependency tree may include something like 70k source files. `npm install` can take several minutes, builds on-save could take several seconds. We resolved to simply doing everything inside of a VM, using sshfs to "persist" the data out to the host machine on-demand for those uncomfortable using vim/tmux inside the VM.

Why can't they use the command line at all?

My first job was at a call center where we trained literally anyone who applied to use command line DOS to take orders for sausage over the phone. This took three days to teach these people how to navigate a pretty extensive CLI interface. Many of them were highschool dropouts with GEDs. If they even attempted to use the mouse the computer would lock up. We had virtually zero issues.

It's astonishing that some people refuse to even open a terminal.

They currently do, but some prefer a UI to manage the containers, and since we're using OSX, making sure boot2docker and the underlying VBOX image is in a good state can sometimes cause a few wrinkles that take a developer to straiten out.

Kitematic could abstract that layer (boot2docker) away with a GUI.

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