Has Anyone Used Dev Containers for Elixir Development?

I know that my co-worker is using containers for development, though I don’t know if he does it the dev-containers way.

Also I don’t know if he is active on this forum or whether he has an account.

Personally I’d advise using something like devenv.sh instead of a dev container. Most of the advantages without the disadvantages of Docker.

Been using that for two years, a dev can switch between any project and have the exact same setup as any other dev in a matter of moments

They are nice for a uniform and reproducible development environment.

They are NOT great when used in github’s browser based devcontainer environment ( extremely slow, laggy ).

I see it as trading in one set of problems for another. ( easily reproducible dev envs, for docker debugging issues )

In the same sense that having a web app inside the container network is a pain, because you’ll have a layer of problems arise from the internal DNS, networking layer, volume mount issues, files missing, etc, meaning there’s more stuff to go wrong in comparison to just having the standard stuff go wrong ( service ports not open, dependencies missing )

just my opinion, nice for initial start, less nice for long term debugging, but still okay

It’s a layer of abstraction, so it doesn’t help developers with learning how to do things manually when stuff goes wrong.

It might just be how i like things, but it really bugs me when tools get in the way, and its especially true for visual studio code and dev containers, its just a layer ( hey its great if its working, but at the same time, I don’t want to spend a few hours debugging/configuring/diagnosing the tool, the plugin, the whatever, just so i can get to the work )

Hi! I just created a template for a Phoenix 1.8.3 project using Docker and Docker Compose, both for production deployment and for running Docker Compose in development mode.

Feel free to download it and adapt it to your needs. If you have any questions, you can send me a message — I’d be happy to help you with whatever you need

https://github.com/rocket4ce/template_docker_dev

I’m wondering if the question was originally about this?

See:

• vscode-docs/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-container.md at main · microsoft/vscode-docs · GitHub
• Create a Dev Container

I only did a quick skim of the repo you shared ( which looked promising for sure ), or maybe I misunderstood the original question.

I thought the original question was about devcontainer.json setup?

I think it’d be straight forward to vibe into your template_docker_dev repo?

Thank for your suggestion!

Actually, I thought about dev container because it have same env for dev & deployment environment. We have some issues in early day when we run project on multi environment (macOS, Windows).

Thanks for sharing! It sounds like we might be creating more trouble instead of making things simpler. I’ve spent a lot of time bringing the local/dev cluster to Kubernetes, and that’s also why I started thinking about dev containers.

Currently, I use the Zed editor for development (VS Code is too slow for me). I develop with multiple nodes, so that might be an issue if I use dev containers.

Thank you so much!

Do you mean Create a Dev Container? I’m a bit confused about the original question.

Or just like containers in general? like docker containers, kubernetes pods with helm charts?

Cause then what rocket4ce posted is totally relevant.

But my recommendation would be to make it easy to run the web app locally outside of the container network, as many things can break down in the container for webapps, debugging, stdout, stderr, tty for breakpoint debugging, gdb, valgrind, delv, etc

As far as just general k8s related container tooling there’s tons of it, but several come to mind for general pod development classically I have used minikube, more recently i’ve looked at k3s, and tilt i really like the spirit of what tilt has going on, especially for any sprawling microservice architecture ( 7+ services ) ( but again a level abstraction, and yet another tool, and I haven’t used it enough to find out how much it complicates things )

But this doesn’t solve the issue of installing the dev dependencies themselves, which is why I thought you were asking about devcontainers.json, which i’d second a vote with DGollings suggestion using the nix based devenv.sh

" Do you mean Create a Dev Container? I’m a bit confused about the original question."

Sorry for not clear question, I want to ask about experience & pros/cons when work with dev container. Your answer in last post is good info for me.