Feedback wanted: Docker for Ruby/Rails Developers book

[r...@therocketfuel.com]

Hey! I’m working on a new book on Docker, aimed at Ruby/Rails devs.

I’d love to get some input from other developers who have heard about or dabbled with Docker, but aren’t using it regularly. I’ve written a tiny survey (literally only 1 question). I’d really appreciate it if you’d share your thoughts: http://bit.ly/2b5XeEM

Cheers!

p.s. I’ve put up a minimal landing page at http://bit.ly/2aW1tGU where you can sign up for occasional progress updates.

p.p.s. If you’re experienced with Docker, I’d love to hear from you with any tips/secrets/best practices for using it with Ruby apps/Microservices in either dev or prod environments (or both). Reply here, or message me.

[Josh Illian]

Traditionally, my company has used Vagrant for our the dev environments of each of our projects.  We have a handful of rails apps setup to communicate as micro services.  With Vagrant, we are able to set static IP addresses for each of the Vagrant hosts by using setting up a common private network between the various Vagrant hosts.   

Recently, we had a new team member join our team who was familiar with Docker and he proceeded to write a new microservice using Docker and Docker Compose.  Really good stuff.  Very elegant and straight forward way to provision the service.  

However, one difficulty we had with Docker for OSX (in beta) is that the Docker host itself does not seem to have a way of exposing the Docker host in a way that other non-Docker containers/VMs (i.e. our Vagrant-based microservices) to receive HTTP requests.  Docker Toolbox (the predecessor to Docker for OSX) does have a command line option that will return the Docker host's IP address, but that ends up being a bit kludgey.  

From my understanding, this is only a limitation on OSX and should not be a problem on Linux.  

I know this is a bit of an edge case, but I just wanted to share my recent experience.  

From what I've seen, Docker, especially with docker-compose, is definitely the way forward for quickly provisioning a development environment for a stand alone project.  However, if for some reason you're going to be mixing Vagrant VMs with Docker containers on OSX, you'll probably need to choose one or the other, at least for now.