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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I've been mostly avoiding Docker, Docker-compose etc. (We got stuck at the "Ansible > Digital Ocean works fine for us" stage. Docker was too new at the time and never really had a reason to re-examine things)

But just this past week after a ton of pain previously trying to get a working Geodjango stack running on my Mac locally for experimentation I discovered a docker-compose script that gave me everything I wanted in about 5 minutes. A sample app. Django, nginx, redis, PostGIS and all the complex dependencies - all working together. I literally typed "docker-compose up" and I had a working web GIS-enabled web app running on localhost. And the fact that the deployment to staging is hopefully just as simple makes me smile.

Of course - production is a different story as I then have to worry that all the magic pieces aren't full of backdoors and security holes but I guess that's a job that needs doing anyway.

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There are some things that have to be made clear to the team when moving to containers (don't use joerandom/alpine as a baseimage, build via digest instead of tag etc) but the speed at which you can onboard people is amazing.

I couldn't imagine deploying a Python application without Docker nowadays.

i've been doing python for 15+ years now and docker is one of the best things to happen to it, possibly it's saving grace in server side software. deployment and dev env setup used to be brutal.

How is this better than ansible, salt, chef, puppet, etc.? Once it's automated it's automated, no?

I wouldn't use the term "better" - I still rely heavily on puppet and ansible.

But the containerization aspect gives the option to pull up and destroy services without worrying about polluting the host you're in.

But couldn't you get the same thing using the virtual environment provided by python? Unless you're using a lot of modules with C extensions, you wouldn't need to install anything outside the virtual environment.

> Unless you're using a lot of modules with C extensions

in my experience only the simplemost applications actually don't need anything outside of vanilla python pip. suddenly the client wants PDF reports and you're setting up e.g. some tex-based printing system with a bunch of host packages needed. only containers give you the peace-of-mind that all dependencies, current and future, can be described as part of the codebase.

> only containers give you the peace-of-mind that all dependencies, current and future, can be described as part of the codebase.

Couldn't the same thing be done via the package manager and a RPM spec or deb file where all the necessary dependencies are listed and installed as part of the package? It could be done on a VM or could be done on a machine by keeping track of what dependencies are installed when installing the application and handling uninstallation by removing all newly installed dependencies along with the application.

My understanding is yes and I believe you are describing NixOs (https://nixos.org/)

but why polute host or go back to VM overhead per application if we have already a solution that is easier to handle? even just in terms of build & launch time it's quite a bit more performant to use containers vs. VMs.

> but why polute host

The package manager can handle removing pretty much any file it installs when uninstalling, so the host really doesn't get "polluted".

> or go back to VM overhead per application

In a development environment hosted on a VM, several applications can be installed on the VM (rather than having one per VM) to reduce overhead. Then testing and making code changes could be done by running a pip -e (editable) install and modifying code in the working directory, or making the change, repackaging and re-installing, and restarting the daemon.

With a container, at least in my experience, you need to re-build it each time you make a change to the code, which actually takes longer than modifying an editable install or re-building the wheel/RPM and reinstalling it.

typically on a dev PC you'll have multiple apps roled out for development / maybe feature testing. if this is done directly on the host it's always possible for these environments to influence each other. very common is to forget to script a dependency, which only may get recognized once someone wants to deploy on a fresh installation.

Yes, but dependencies are handled by the package manager. So if one is missing, it's a simple matter of adding it to the list of dependencies.

In any case, the point I was trying to make is that the development cycle with containers, in my experience, is slower because you have to go through the build step every time you make a change. For an intpreted language like python, that shouldn't be necessary until close to the end where you test a fresh build before submitting the changes for review.

The setup is a bit more involved, but this can be mitigated in several ways. One is docker or SSH plug-ins in editors like VS code coupled with an SSH server included in the develop build phase, like you would use to develop on a remote server. The other approach is adding the source tree as a volume. You can also do a mixed approach where development is done on host, but testing and deployment is done in docker.

Started playing with Docker because it was the cool new thing, but professionally I get more use out of Ansible > Digital Ocean. Seems like your Geodjango experience had more to do with the sharing of the script than the underlying tool.

I guess but Ansible > Digital Ocean wouldn't have helped me get a local dev environment. For that I needed containers or a VM - and containers are a much lighter solution.

I literally wasted nearly a day and filled up my drive with compilation artifacts last time I tried getting GeoDjango working. All those binary dependencies, subtle OS config changes and custom Postgres extensions can be a pain.

So given my need for local deploy and remote deploy it's hard to think of a better solution.

I haven't yet figured out a comfortable local and remote docker solution yet, but I regularly use ansible for this.

I usually spin up a local lxc container and point the ansible scripts at it using a dev inventory file. Mount the source code from the host filesystem onto the the container and I'm ready to go.

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