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Is docker worth using for small projects?

I've wanted to try it ever since pyTennessee, but it looked like it didn't make sense for spinning up a one-off hobby project. Without using it to grapple with the problems it is supposed to solve, I feel like I'd just be running through a tutorial which I could do just as easily when I actually need Docker.



Yes. 100 times yes.

One of the greatest things about Docker is it lets you consolidate your setup environments. You can great a handful of 2k scripts, store them in Dropbox, and then if you current development machine bites it, a simple "docker add <script>" gets you up and running exactly as before.

Docker lets you stop treating your personal machine as a server. And that's a beautiful thing.


Huh. Thank you. I suppose I'll do that then.


If you want to get into docker for a small project I suggest something like Dokku as a first-step/primer. Its a 100 lines of bash that you should read and uses Heroku BuildPacks to do the heavy lifting. Great way to get introduced to Docker and software driven sys admining with rock solid deployment architectures.

https://github.com/progrium/dokku


I do but I have multiple small projects so I can just re-use the container and change some config files.

Its basically a build script that is less than 100 lines, generally, so it is really easy to use.


FYI there are some really cool ways that you can recycle and re-use dockerfiles with ONBUILD commands. We actually do that for some of our containers as well, such as when you have multiple python projects. https://github.com/deis/dockerfiles/blob/master/python-runti...

Just add "FROM deis/python-runtime" to the top of your project and declare a CMD or an ENTRYPOINT in your Dockerfile and suddenly you have a python project installed and ready to go.


Thanks but 'change some config files' generally means modifying the conf/ tree I import all my configurations from. [e.g. Nginx domain name, requirements.txt]

It doesn't mean modifying the Dockerfile.




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