So far I have been happy using vagrant for setting up development environments for different clients' projects. In the era of containers I was curious how a Docker based development environment would perform.

Putting a Rails app into a container

There is a lot of articles about how to put a new Rails app into a container for development purposes. I started with this one.

I wanted to test the idea on one of the projects I currently work on. It's a Rails 4 app. The objective was to have a fully working development environment with guard-livereload refreshing my browser whenever I make changes to the files.

My current development machine is a MacBook Air with macOS Sierra and I already have Docker for Mac installed:

$ docker --version
Docker version 17.03.1-ce, build c6d412e

$ docker-compose --version
docker-compose version 1.11.2, build dfed245

Creating the image

We need to create a docker image with our application inside. In the root directory of the rails project create ./Dockerfile:

# ./Dockerfile
FROM ruby:2.4
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y build-essential nodejs
RUN mkdir /app
WORKDIR /app
COPY Gemfile /app/Gemfile
COPY Gemfile.lock /app/Gemfile.lock
RUN gem install bundler && bundle install --jobs 20 --retry 5
COPY . ./
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["sh", "docker-cmd.sh"]

Here is our ./docker-cmd.sh:

#!/bin/sh
set -ex

# run guard with livereload in background
bin/bundle exec guard -i &

# start the server
bin/rails server -b 0.0.0.0

Now we can create the docker image:

$ docker build . -t my-app

You can test the image immediately:

$ docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 -t my-app

My app requires a Postgres database so I see errors in the terminal when I access http://localhost:3000 but it is running! Now we need to connect it with a database.

You can stop the running app with CTRL+C.

(Check output of docker ps and if the container is still there stop it with docker stop <CONTAINER ID>)

Connecting the database

We will use another docker image for our database and connect it to our app image with Docker Compose.

We need to create another file in the root of our project (docker-compose.yml)

# ./docker-compose.yml
app:
  build: .
  ports:
    - 3000:3000
    - 35729:35729 # livereload port
  links:
    - postgres
  volumes:
    - './:/app'

postgres:
  image: postgres:9.4
  ports:
    - 5432
  volumes:
    - './postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data'

This file defines a simple stack composed of two components - our app and postgres database. We use docker volumes to keep the database data in the host machine (postgres-data). (Don't forget to add this folder to .gitignore and .dockerignore)

We also use volumes to link our host's project root folder to /app folder inside the app container, so that any change made locally will be immediately visible inside the container.

Next we need to configure our app to talk to the database.

Edit ./config/database.yml and update the development and test sections:

# ./config/database.yml
default: &default
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  pool: 5

development:
  <<: *default
  database: my_app_dev
  host: postgres      # <-----
  username: postgres  # <-----

test:
  <<: *default
  database: my_app_test
  host: postgres      # <-----
  username: postgres  # <-----
# ...

Now let's build our stack:

$ docker-compose build

And let's start it:

$ docker-compose up

Before we access the app we should create the database(s). In another terminal window run:

$ docker-compose exec app bin/rake db:create
$ docker-compose exec app bin/rake db:migrate
$ docker-compose exec app bin/rake db:test:prepare

Now we should be able to see our app working at http://localhost:3000

It is so sloooow!

The application works (LiveReload too), but it is just not usable. It is extremely slow. It takes about 20s to load the front page! Looks that this problem affects only OSX. There is an issue #77 addressing it.

A quick google search pointed me into docker-sync

Making it fast

docker-sync promises to:

Run your application at full speed while syncing your code for development, finally empowering you to utilize docker for development under OSX/Windows/Linux

Install it with:

$ gem install docker-sync
$ docker-sync-stack --version
0.4.6

The documentation is not great and it took me a while to set it up but eventually I made it work using rsync implementation.

Making LiveReload work was a bit tricky. The changes to the local files were properly synchronized with the container but for some reasont LiveReload wasn't detecting them. It turned out that rsync by default is not overwriting the files directly. Instead it is creating a new hidden file, then it removes the old copy, and only then it renames the hidden file as the new one (or something like that). LiveReload doesn't pick new files - it works only with modifications of the existing files.

Fortunately we can tell rsync to change files in place with --inplace flag!

We have to create another yml file for docker-sync (./docker-sync.yml):

# ./docker-sync.yml
version: "2"
syncs:
  app-sync:
    sync_strategy: 'rsync'
    src: './'
    sync_host_port: 10872
    sync_excludes: ['.gitignore', '.git/', 'tmp', 'log', 'README.md', 'postgres-data/', '.docker*']
    sync_args: '-v --inplace'
    notify_terminal: false
    watch_excludes: ['.*/.git', '.gitignore', 'docker-*.yml', 'Dockerfile', 'postgres-data', '.docker*']
    watch_args: '-v'

We also have to update our ./docker-compose.yml:

# ./docker-compose.yml
app:
  build: .
  ports:
    - 3000:3000
    - 35729:35729
  links:
    - postgres
  volumes:
    - app-sync:/app:nocopy # <-- the only change

postgres:
  image: postgres:9.4
  ports:
    - 5432
  volumes:
    - './postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data'

And here is how we run it:

$ docker-sync-stack start

The app loads now in a few seconds. Nice.

Testing

Here is how you can run the tests in the container (rspec):

$ docker-compose exec app bin/rspec spec/controllers

I don't know yet how to setup the integration testing. I have a lot of "feature" tests using capybara and selenium and I'd like to run them inside the container. I will probably use another container to host a selenium server and run the tests using that. Maybe I'll write about it once I figure it out.

Conclusion

Overall the experience is quite positive. I can quickly spin up the development environment and start coding. The memory and CPU utilization look much better than with vagrant. I'm gonna do some work in this setup to see how it feels in longer run.

There are a few issues though:

• I had to configure Docker to keep its data on an external hdd (it eats too much space - see #371)
• The docker-sync is a hack. I hope one day Docker will perform much better on mounted volumes.