zbtnot/nomad-local-dev-demo

A demo of nomad with docker for local development

nomad-local-demo

A sample repository demonstrating how to leverage nomad for local development via docker. The motivation for doing this as opposed to docker-compose is that nomad is closer to what a production environment might look like.

How to use this demo

• Install nomad, docker and tmux
• From the project directory, run in order:
  • make docker-build
  • make nomad-up
  • make nomad-run-job
• If everything succeeded, make service-info should display the port the container is listening on.

Thoughts

This kinda works, but there are limitations:

• Nomad's HCL does not allow you to specify a relative path from the job command, hence the wonky distfile for the job
  • There are other ways to mount into the container, but these are also overkill for development.
• You need to specify additional configuration to enable docker's mounting feature.
  • For production, you may not need this; Ideally your container images would include your application code.
  • That said, it is incredibly handy for iterating during the development process. No need to rebuild every time you make a change.