Why Use Docker for Rails?

Learn how Docker saves repeated effort by providing a standardized environment that avoids many forms of the “works on my machine” issues.

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What is Docker?

Docker is a set of tools built around the idea of packaging and running software in small, sandboxed environments known as containers.

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Five capabilities of Docker

At a high level, Docker offers the following five features:

  1. Packaging: The ability to package software into a reusable, shareable format known as images.

  2. Distribution: The ability to easily share packaged software (images) with other people and deploy it to different machines.

  3. Runtime: The ability to run, pause, restart or stop packaged software in a reliable, repeatable way.

  4. Infrastructure creation: Creating virtual machines ready to run Docker containers.

  5. Orchestration and scaling: Managing the release of software to a single Docker node or across an entire cluster.

Together, these five features combine to enable a new way of delivering and running software.

Benefits of using Docker

The benefits of using Docker for your development environment include:

  • Docker’s built-in delivery mechanism installs software dependencies in one line.

  • Docker allows simulating production scenarios by running your app in multi-node, production-like environments on your local machine.

  • Technologies as part of our Rails apps – NGINX, Redis, Postgres, MySQL, Memcached, Elasticsearch, HAProxy, RabbitMQ, Node, etc., are already packaged and ready to go with Docker.

  • Docker can be used to add multiple technologies (like NGINX, Redis, Postgres, MySQL, Memcached, Elasticsearch, HAProxy, RabbitMQ, Node, etc.) that might be needed in a Rails app development.

  • Docker is reliable and resilient. Even if an instance dies, new copies of your app will be spawned on the remaining nodes.

  • Docker containers are much lighter-weight than virtual machines (VMs), allowing resources to be used more efficiently.