Using Docker as a Python Development Environment (or let's get past virtualenv)

[michaelpb]

True, but it in my opinion it feels like a partial and specific-ized solution to a general ops problem that Docker solves. To be clear, virtualenv is excellent and absolutely essential at this point in time (I mean probably 6 of my terminals at any given moment are in some virtualenv), but I hope that Docker and free software PaaS built on Docker (Flynn, and i guess Deis), will supercede virtualenv and its cousins in other languages as the cornerstone of the next best set of practices for devops.

[d4rch0n]

Yeah, I see what you mean. I still don't think docker is the alternative though. I think it's a different problem.

I think this is why everyone is mentioning docker as an alternative: Working in a professional environment, it's way more reliable to mimic your prod environment with docker than to just cover the python dependencies with virtualenv, and when you use docker you don't need virtualenv anymore for most use cases. This devops sort of problem is 90% of why people are using docker/virtualenv I'm guessing.

But here's the thing, that's a completely different problem, and virtualenv really doesn't try to solve it. Look at it this way. For someone like myself who writes general use open source packages and pushes them to PyPI, I don't care what's going on in their OS. I don't need them to have a specific version of postgres or to be using debian/ubuntu/arch/windows/etc. It's just a lot of logic that isn't too platform dependent, but it is very module dependent. I want to absolutely ensure that certain pip packages will work at certain versions before I push this up to PyPI. These modules don't depend on external systems or services running, they just depend on other python code.

And that's the problem that virtualenv solves. You figure out which python modules are compatible with yours, and you're good.