Earlier this month I mentioned on Mastodon that I was replacing a Docker-based local development environment at my day job with a Nix-based one, orchestrated with overmind and a justfile. There was quite a lot of interest in particular in how overmind and just could be used to replace a container / compose-based local development. While I can’t share the details of the significantly more complex migration I did at my day job (yet!

Some folks on the internet were interested in how I had managed to ditch Docker for local development. This is a slightly overdue write up on how I typically do things now with Nix, Overmind and Just.

  • JeezyOPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    The whole point is that you can build a working container image and then ship it to a registry (including private registries) so that your other developers/users/etc don’t have to build them and can just run the existing image.

    Agreed, we still do this in the areas where we use Docker at day job.

    I think the mileage with this approach can vary depending on the languages in use and the velocity of feature iteration (ie. if the company is still tweaking product-market fit, pivoting to a new vertical, etc.).

    I’ve lost count of the number of times where a team decides they need to npm install something with a heavy node-gyp step to build native modules which require yet another obscure system dependency that is not in the base layer. 😅