We're pretty heavily invested in Docker. To this point, it's really nice knowing that all the developers are operating in consistent environments.
An additional bonus is that using Docker makes it really easy to propagate infrastructure changes to the rest of your team for use in development. And, more importantly, know those infrastructure changes are consistent across local dev setups.
As an example, I recently incorporated Sphinx search into a project we were working on. I didn't want to require devs to install Sphinx on their own machines and get it up and running for search to function properly. I also didn't want devs to have the overhead of running Sphinx for search on their local boxes unless they were actively working on something related to search. Basically, I wanted search to be optionally configured to run on startup.
I used a DockerFile to setup Sphinx in its own container, pushed the DockerFile to a Tools source repository we use, and then incorporated the build and running of that container into our startup scripts (just some simple orchestration stuff for the local machine written in bash). Now, if a dev wants a containerized search mechanism they run a simple bash script to build that container, then run another command to spin up our dockerized web app with a connection to a running sphinx search container. We do this for all of our services: mysql, redis, sphinx, the web app itself, and anything else we might need.
As an added bonus, all the Docker CLI work and orchestration of our application is easily hidden behind a shell script. If a dev wants to run the webapp, they simply run: app server dev. If they want the app with search they run: app server dev search from the command line. Developers never need to know what's going on under the hood to get their job done. From their perspective, it just works.
We're pretty heavily invested in Docker. To this point, it's really nice knowing that all the developers are operating in consistent environments.
An additional bonus is that using Docker makes it really easy to propagate infrastructure changes to the rest of your team for use in development. And, more importantly, know those infrastructure changes are consistent across local dev setups.
As an example, I recently incorporated Sphinx search into a project we were working on. I didn't want to require devs to install Sphinx on their own machines and get it up and running for search to function properly. I also didn't want devs to have the overhead of running Sphinx for search on their local boxes unless they were actively working on something related to search. Basically, I wanted search to be optionally configured to run on startup.
I used a DockerFile to setup Sphinx in its own container, pushed the DockerFile to a Tools source repository we use, and then incorporated the build and running of that container into our startup scripts (just some simple orchestration stuff for the local machine written in bash). Now, if a dev wants a containerized search mechanism they run a simple bash script to build that container, then run another command to spin up our dockerized web app with a connection to a running sphinx search container. We do this for all of our services: mysql, redis, sphinx, the web app itself, and anything else we might need.
As an added bonus, all the Docker CLI work and orchestration of our application is easily hidden behind a shell script. If a dev wants to run the webapp, they simply run: app server dev. If they want the app with search they run: app server dev search from the command line. Developers never need to know what's going on under the hood to get their job done. From their perspective, it just works.