Developers today need to work very hard to understand, develop and release software. As complexity increase, they work with multiple codebases in different programming lanugages with vast array of fragmented tools. Git and code-based configuration can be used to control and manage these complexities and we see it already happenning in the wild with:
- Package dependencies - modern PL toolchains use configuration files to define package dependencies.
- IaC (infrastructure as code) + GitOps - Instructions for provisioning cloud infrastructure and deployment
- Dockerfiles - self-contained instructions for building image
Taking it further, a "self-contained" repository can contain futher configurations to include (but not limited to):
- Documentation sites
- Development environment configuration
- CI Pipeline defintions
- Encrypted secrets
- Security poilicies
- API defintions
- And more....
By making all these defintions contained in our source control, we can provide better developer experience and lower the barrier for developing, building and depolying complex applications at any revsion.
This document designed to document and aggregate tools & practices that can be used to make repositories self-contained.
This is a living document, currently at a very early stage. PRs, tool suggestions and improvement are most welcome.
This section should focus on how we can define our development environment configuration in our repository in order to enable the creation of development enviroments that are tailored to our project.
- Talk: Self-contained Development Environments for everyone (Slides.
.devcontainer Code Examples (Forks):
| Challenge | Solution | Example tools |
|---|---|---|
| Basic SDK/Runtime dependencies | Development in container | VSCode+Docker, GitPod |
| Cloud dependencies | Compatible dockerized implementations | Minio, redis |
| Initial application data | Data seeding | Scripts, replicating from cloud |
| More hardware | Remote environment | Docker-machine, codespaces |
| Multi-Container Apps | Nested Containers | Dind, compose, tilt |
| Kubernetes Apps | Nested Kubernetes | Kind, k3d, tilt, skaffold |
| Exposing network dependencies | Reverse proxy, wild card development dns | Traefik, nginx, *.xip, *.localtest.me |
| Serverless | Mock cloud frameworks | Localstack |
Developing inside a container instead of directly on machine. In the container we can define all the SDKs, CLIs, programming languges runtime, tools, extendsions and other dependencies.
Using VS Code:
- Install Code Remote containers extension
- Try opening a project in a development container
- Customize your Dockerfile in devcontainer.json
Examples:
Nested Docker
Local kubernetes
Mocking cloud dependencies
Data seeding
Multi-Container apps