My Docker setup for a quick start

April 9th, 2021

On the occasion of starting yet another project, hoping it’ll actually get released one day, I wanted to share my Docker configuration which I use for quickly orchestrating different stacks together.

It’s nothing fancy, there are likely better ways to do it, however my usual setup is enough for:

• Quickly setting up different services
• Maintaining fully reproducible environments from the start (tear down and rebuild every second day)
• Separating day-to-day work files from build files
• Quickly adjusting the structure for new ideas and needs

Overview

    
# Build and initial configuration files
docker/
    # Build files per service
    service-a/
              Dockerfile.dev
              Dockerfile.prod
              # Env variables per service
              .env.example
              # Build-step files and directories
              vol/
                  servers.json
    # Services configuration for each environment
    compose.dev.yml
    compose.prod.yml
# Day-to-day work files
src/
    service-a/
    
  

About Dockerfile.[dev|prod]

Differences between Dockerfile.dev and Dockerfile.prod? During development you may want to include a debugger, run an empty container with tail -f /dev/null or just include a different base image. While this distinction introduces code duplication, it’s clear how many different target environments your project supports, at least within the context of Docker. In more complicated scenarios however, with bigger files, they can be merged into one, with multiple stages and conditional logic based on arguments/environment configuration.

About top-level src

The top-level src directory and it’s subdirectories is what is mapped via compose.[dev|prod].yml files. These directories are mounted as volumes, and I usually use dev containers plugin for Visual Studio Code to jump into them and work with full support of given container’s technology and scope, at the same time keeping my editor’s local configuration and preferences.