Docker images are installed as layers on a hosts physical operating system. You can get a “full” read of the base image size by issuing the command below (showing the associated output with sizes).

For about two years, I’ve wanted to use for local development. Hypothetically, it offers all the benefits of virtualized development environments like (stable, re-creatable, isolated, etc.) but requires fewer resources. Working at a consultancy, sometimes I need to switch back and forth between multiple projects in a day.

Spinning a full VM up and down can take a while. Alternatively, running two or more virtual machines at once can eat up all of my computer’s resources. While I’d been interested in Docker for a while, I hadn’t had the time and energy to really dive into it. Download messages from iphone to mac for free.

Then I went to DockerCon this April, which finally gave me enough momentum to figure out how to integrate it into my development workflow. Sharing is Caring (About File IO Speed) I suspected—correctly—that Docker would fall prey to some of the same shortcomings as Vagrant. Specifically, I am thinking of the speed of shared volumes. Generally speaking, sharing files between MacOS and a virtual OS on a hypervisor breaks down when too many reads or writes are required in a short amount of time.

This may be due to running asset pipelines like those of or that generate tons of temporary files. Free email signature templates for mac word. Most sharing systems (, NFS) do not support ignoring subdirectories. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that many framework tools do not let you configure the location of dependencies and temp directories.

I’m looking at you, Ember. What’s a Developer to Do? Hi Lucas, Thanks for the links. Those seem like good options for many use cases. If I recall correctly, nfs sharing had decent performance for the Rails pipeline but choked on Ember’s build pipeline.

It’s possible the second option you presented would fix this, though, since the files “live” on the docker machine / VirtualBox VM. That said, one of my other goals was to (semi)-seamlessly transition back to standard Docker for Mac volumes, if and when they fix their speed issues. My assumption is that Docker will prioritize Docker For Mac as the preferred/default way to develop on a Mac, versus using a standalone VM as your docker machine. So I’m betting on Docker for Mac long-term. Consequently, I like docker-sync in that getting back to “vanilla” Docker for Mac is as simple as tweaking the volumes in docker-compose.yml and dropping docker-sync.yml. And I do pretty much use docker-compose for everything, though I can see how docker-sync would be much less nice to use without it.