Drupal, Docker and Development Part I — The Setup

So you use Drupal and you would like to start using Docker. The first step is getting a development setup. I still prefer people I am teaching to go through the traditional Docker tutorials. Once you have the fundamentals down currently I recommend dinghy for Mac OSX.

https://github.com/codekitchen/dinghy

Why? Instead of the standard Docker-Machine? Well with dinghy you are essentially using a streamlined version for Mac.

What does Dinghy give you that Docker Machine does not. It gives you NFS shares by default on VirtualBox. That is the biggest requirement for any virtual environment that I run locally with Drupal development.

Drupal is file system intensive. It scans folder for modules all the time. Features scans all the features and compares them to your database to determine what is different. So a slow file system is a bottle neck that will destroy your development workflow.

The requirements are pretty simple if you are familiar with home brew. It requires Docker & Docker Machine.

$ brew install docker docker-machine
$ brew tap codekitchen/dinghy
$ brew install dinghy

Finally to create your dinghy machine run

$ dinghy create --provider virtualbox

To be continued in Part II setting up Dinghy for Drupal Development.