I maintain the Ruby Client wrapper for my company’s REST API. I’m not exactly sure how this happened. I might have volunteered, or it could have been bad luck. Either way, it was time for a little bug fixing and as it so happens, I got a new laptop a couple of weeks ago. You know what that means; starting from scratch, again.

This time will be different. I’ll do it right this time, I tell myself. Maybe a VM, or a Vagrant file, or something hot like Docker.

Oooh, the new hotness, Docker; that would be fun.

I've been learning about Docker and Kubernetes for a bit so creating a development environment for some quick Ruby fixes would be fun and educational. Especially, since I already have Docker installed.

With a 5 line Dockerfile and a Ruby 2.2 base image, I was set and ready. A one line code bug fix, a version bump and our Ruby Gem was updated. So smooth it was impressive and exciting.

My Dockerfile

With a docker build -t devtheruby . and a docker run -it -v $(pwd):/app devtheruby bash, I had my environment up and running. With the volume mount, I could edit the code from VS Code on the host and build and run tests in the connected terminal. Not a bad way to work.

Docker was really easy to set up and as a bonus, I added the Dockerfile to the Git repository for future me. I try to be nice to future me; he has to fix all my mistakes. For quick fixes, this seems like a good alternative to VM's. I'm just not sure if this is the way I would want to develop every day. I think I'm going to leave that up to future me.