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

May 7, 2014 7k views
mark.a.everhart
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mark.a.everhart
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.
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1 Answer
asb MOD May 7, 2014
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
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