Earlier this month I mentioned on Mastodon that I was replacing a Docker-based local development environment at my day job with a Nix-based one, orchestrated with overmind and a justfile. There was quite a lot of interest in particular in how overmind and just could be used to replace a container / compose-based local development. While I can’t share the details of the significantly more complex migration I did at my day job (yet!

Some folks on the internet were interested in how I had managed to ditch Docker for local development. This is a slightly overdue write up on how I typically do things now with Nix, Overmind and Just.

  • MartinEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    We are over 1000 developers and use docker ce just fine. We use a self hosted repository for our images. IT is configuring new computers to use this internal docker repository by default. So new employees don’t even have to know about it to do their first docker build.

    We all use Linux on our workstations and laptops. That might make it easier.

    • JeezyOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      We all use Linux on our workstations and laptops. That might make it easier.

      You are living my dream!

      I think this is the key piece; the experience of Docker on Linux (including WSL if it’s not hooking into Docker Desktop on Windows) and on macOS is just so wildly difference when it comes to performance, reliability and stability.

    • @[email protected]English
      0•1 year ago

      Op comes off a bit, uninformed. E.g. I use docker engine and docker compose inside WSL2 on windows and performance is fine, then I use Intellij to manage images/containers, the service tab handles the basics. If I need to do anything very involved I use the cli.

      Docker is fine, the docker desktop panic really only revealed who never took the time to learn how to use docker and what the alternative UIs are.