I finally got around to getting this and my other personal projects running on docker. I still have a lot to learn about the operations side of things with things like swarms and Kubernetes, but for development I think I have a decent workflow set up. I’m sure I’ll find ways to improve on it as I go.
I’m still able to make do with a tiny Digital Ocean droplet, but I have already seen some of the challenges of running docker with limited resources. Just as I was getting logged in to post this, I was also deploying an update to an app. That caused everything to freeze up. Eventually the requests timed out and I was able to deploy and then log in after that was done. Clearly not something I would want on a production server.
I switched from GitHub to GitLab not too long ago, and it’s a good thing I did because they have a free docker registry service included. I was worried it might be too slow, but after the first images of a project get pushed up, the changed layers can actually get pushed up pretty quickly.
I’ve also set up a desktop development environment with Linux using my wife’s old laptop. Web development tools, docker included, just work so much better on Linux. Even though the specs are much lower than my desktop PC, my web projects run faster because I don’t have to worry about VMs.