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Ditching Docker for Local Development
(lgug2z.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Hi!
First I'd like to clarify that I'm not "anti-container/Docker". 😅
There is a lot of discussion on this article (with my comments!) going on over at Tildes. I don't wanna copy-paste everything from there, but I'll share the first main response I gave to someone who had very similar feedback to kick-start some discussion on those points here as well:
Some high level points on the "why":
Reproducibility: Docker builds are not reproducible, and especially in a company with more than a handful of developers, it's nice not to have to worry about a
docker buildcommand in the on-boarding docs failing inexplicably (from the POV of the regular joe developer) from one day to the nextCost: Docker licenses for most companies now cost $9/user/month (minimum of 5 seats required) - this is very steep for something that doesn't guarantee reproducibility and has poor performance to boot (see below)
Performance: Docker performance on macOS (and Windows), especially storage mount performance remains poor; this is even more acutely felt when working with languages like Node where the dependencies are file-count heavy. Sure, you could just issue everyone Linux laptops, but these days hiring is hard enough without shooting yourself in the foot by not providing a recent MBP to new devs by default
I think it's also worth drawing a line between containers as a local development tool and containers as a deployment artifact, as the above points don't really apply to the latter.
What makes you say that?
My team relies on Docker because it is reproducible…
You might be interested in this article that compares nix and docker. It explains why docker builds are not considered reproducible:
and why nix builds are reproducible a lot of the time:
Containerization has other advantages though (security) and you can actually use nix's reproducible builds in combination with (docker) containers.
I’ll certainly give this a read!
Are you saying that nix will cache all the dependencies within itself/its “container,” or whatever its container replacement would be called?
Yep, sort of.
It saves each version of your dependencies to the /nix/store folder with a checksum prefixing the program name. For example you might have the following Firefox programs
Because of this you can largely avoid dependency conflicts. For example a program A could depend on
/nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1and a program B could depend on/nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1and both programs would work as both have dependencies satisfied. AFAIK using other build systems you would have to break program A or program B (or find versions of program A and program B where both dependencies are satisfied).