Rich editors in a Docker development environment

Question

So my team and I have bought into Docker - it is fantastic for deployment and testing. My real question is how to set up a great developer experience, specifically around writing Python apps, but this question could be generalized to nodejs, Java, etc.

The problem: When writing a Python app, I really like having decent linting/autocomplete functionality, there are some really good editors out there (Atom, VSCode, PyCharm) that provide these, but most really want a Python install on the local disk. The real advantage of Docker is that all of the core language and any project libraries can all be in the container, so reproducing all of that on the host machine just for developing is a pain.

I know that PyCharm pro does support Docker and docker-compose, but I found it quite sluggish and a lot of the test running capabilities were busted. On top of that, I really would like something that I can commit to version control so that the team can share dev setup and people don't have to repeat all of the steps for their own system.

A few Ideas that I had were:

1. Install an editor (like Atom) in a sidecar Docker container and use X11 forwarding
2. Use a browser based editor such as https://c9.io/ in a container - this seems most promising
3. Install some agent in a dev container that could handle autocomplete/linting, etc. and connect to it from a locally running editor - I think this would be the best solution, but I also think that right now it actually doesn't exist.

Has anyone had luck setting up a more productive development environment besides just mounting volumes and editing text?

Answer 1

You should use an 'advanced' IDE like IntelliJ (Pycharm) and configure a remote Python SDK using SSH-Access to your App-Docker-Container (using a shared ssh-key to auth against the app-container with a preinstalled openssh server and preconfigured authorized_keys file). You can share this SDK information in your project file with all devs, so they wlll have this setup out of the box

1) This will ensure, your IDE knows about all the python libs/symbols available/installed in your docker-container during runtime. It will also enable you to properly debug remotely at the same time

2) This ensures, you have an IDE at your hand including a lot of important additional features like the inspector, 3way duff, search in path.. . hardly any of the Browser-Based IDEs will catch up with Pycharm at this point IMHO

Of course, as already mentioned in the comments, you need to share aka mount your code into the container. On linux, you plainly use host-volume-mounts from your local src folder to the container.

On OSX, you will run into performance issues when using host mounts. You might use something like http://docker-sync.io ( i am biased - there are also a lot of other similar tools )