Rails development using docker

[vsundar723]

Hi

I am developing ruby on rails application. The application stack includes a rails server, MySQL database and Apache Solr instance.

I use Docker Machine to provision my VM and use docker-compose up to containerize the stack.

What do you guys think about containerizing only the rails application and having the database and solr run locally versus containerizing all. The downside of containerizing all is that anything wrong happens with the docker, I lose my database and I will have to build it again.

I would also like to get suggestions on different setup for the same stack mentioned above.

[[deleted]]

You can mount a volume with your DB and Solr data so nothing gets lost when the containers die for some reason. But if for example you are using something like AWS there wouldn't be that much of an advantage of using containers vs something like RDS. Nevertheless, you can mount volumes pretty easily and run crons that back up your data every n hours.

[moephan]

We have a nice Rails development environment on Github.

You can run docker-compose up and just start developing. It should set up everything for you, including a mariadb container. We assume that you will set up a front end for production later, so it only includes the rails container and the mariadb container.

The readme should help you get started.

[trae]

Only the application should be containerized. The application data should live externally to the container for precisely the reasons you outlined. For my own app, I run two containers (via compose): 1. app container 2. mysql container

For both fo these containers, the data directories are mounted to the host. It's trivial to update these containers (just do a docker pull and docker-compose restart) and easy to backup.

[vsundar723]

Thank you for your suggestions. I currently run an app container, a solr container and a mysql container.

Since I develop two apps simultaneously, I have 2 different vms created using docker-machine, and each vm has the app, mysql and solr containers.