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.

  • malloc@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Kind of cool if your production infrastructure can match. But for most companies (ie, Fortune 500 and some medium companies) implementing this would need a force majeure.

    Decades of software rot, change in management, change in architecture, waxing and waning of software and hardware trends, half assed implementations, and good ole bottom tier software consultation/contractors brought into the mix make such things impossible to implement at scale.

    Once worked at a company where their onprem infra was a mix of mainframe, ibm / dell proprietary crap, Oracle vendor locked, and some rhel/centos servers. Of course some servers were on different versions of the OS. So it was impossible to setup a development environment to replicate issues.

    For the most part, that’s why I still use docker for most jobs. Much easier to pull in the right image, configure app deployment declaratively, and reproduce the bug(s). I would say 90% of the time it was reproducible. Before docker/containerization it was much less than that and we had to reproduce in some non production environment that was shared amongst team.