Using Docker & Digital ocean to setup a development environment (Cloud IDE).

Question

I currently develop on OSX and a Chromebook with Ubuntu 14.04 installed. I’m currently using a Cloud IDE (Codio) so that my development environment stays the same on both machines but I feel like I could replicate that using Digital Ocean and Docker.

Essentially, I want to create a couple of base development environments (Rails/Postgres and Node/Express/Angular/Mongo being the two big ones). Every time I start a new project I want to be able to start in a “fresh” environment. Of course, I want all of this to exist on one Digital Ocean droplet.

Is it possible? If so, how would I go about doing it.

Andrew SB · Answer

This is certainly something that you could do with Docker. If you aren’t particularly experienced with Docker, I’d suggest following through their tutorials:

https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/

After the introduction tutorial, learn about Dockerfiles, they are basically the templates used to create your containers:

https://www.docker.io/learn/dockerfile/

Just to give you a taste, an extremely basic Dockerfile to install Rails might look like:


# Set the base image to use to Ubuntu
FROM ubuntu

# Update the repository
RUN apt-get update

# Install stuff
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -qy install postgresql curl
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -yq ruby rails

You then build it with:


sudo docker build -t rails - < Dockerfile

Question

Using Docker & Digital ocean to setup a development environment (Cloud IDE).