Software engineer. Currently working with TypeScript, Ruby and Terraform to build digital solutions! Enthusiast about Elixir, OTP, design patterns and best practices.
Is it just plain Elixir application or is there also Phoenix involved?
If it's just a plain Elixir application, I would just go with basic ubuntu image and build the development container from it, in your case it would be the bionic release. If you have Phoenix involved, I would just use the Bitwalker's image which is used in this article. For production deployments, you can use different image and package the application to Ubuntu based image. This little bit breaks the principle that you have the same runtime in every environment (local, development, staging, production).
Even though you can also run Phoenix application in Ubuntu based image, but you need to install all the dependencies related to Phoenix if you are using Ubuntu as your base image.
But even in the second case if you decide to use Bitwalker's image on local and Ubuntu on deployments, you would have the same runtime in development, staging and production, and bugs related to environment issues could be spotted early on when testing in development or staging.
What comes to the dev utils, if I were you, I would just install needed tools in to the docker image. It will take a little bit longer to build local development image and run it in container.
Hey, Aleksi, thanks for the reply! It's a phoenix project which runs on a VPS (Ubuntu bionic, Erlang/OTP 22, Elixir 1.10.2) and I want to have a development environment as close to the production as I can, at least OS and Erlang version and Elixir version.
It seems that I'll need to build my docker container from Ubuntu image...
Software engineer. Currently working with TypeScript, Ruby and Terraform to build digital solutions! Enthusiast about Elixir, OTP, design patterns and best practices.
Is it just plain Elixir application or is there also Phoenix involved?
If it's just a plain Elixir application, I would just go with basic ubuntu image and build the development container from it, in your case it would be the bionic release. If you have Phoenix involved, I would just use the Bitwalker's image which is used in this article. For production deployments, you can use different image and package the application to Ubuntu based image. This little bit breaks the principle that you have the same runtime in every environment (local, development, staging, production).
Even though you can also run Phoenix application in Ubuntu based image, but you need to install all the dependencies related to Phoenix if you are using Ubuntu as your base image.
But even in the second case if you decide to use Bitwalker's image on local and Ubuntu on deployments, you would have the same runtime in development, staging and production, and bugs related to environment issues could be spotted early on when testing in development or staging.
What comes to the dev utils, if I were you, I would just install needed tools in to the docker image. It will take a little bit longer to build local development image and run it in container.
Hey, Aleksi, thanks for the reply! It's a phoenix project which runs on a VPS (Ubuntu bionic, Erlang/OTP 22, Elixir 1.10.2) and I want to have a development environment as close to the production as I can, at least OS and Erlang version and Elixir version.
It seems that I'll need to build my docker container from Ubuntu image...
in that case, yes. It is a bit heavy compared to alpine based images, but totally doable!