Docker based development environment

[shiroyasha]

I have played around with the idea of using docker as a development environment for developing elixir. It works very nice, and it would allow us quickly compile on more than one OTP platform without dirtying our host machines (e.g installing kerl and compiling various erlang versions).

The development flow would be the following:

1. First, you open a terminal, navigate to the root of the project, and start a development machine. For example, you would type docker-compose run erl192 to compile/test your code based on Erlang 19.2. This starts a bash shell, and shares(mounts) the projects into the docker image.

2. You edit the code, either on your host machine with Atom for example, or from inside of the docker image with Vim and when you are happy with the changes you can type make test in the bash shell from the running docker image.

This could be also used as the base for testing in the CI environment, but I am not sure of the performance penalty.

I got a successful (green) build for every docker image (erl_18.1, erl_18.2, erl_18.3, erl_19.0, erl_19.1, erl_19.2, erl_19.3)

Let me know if you like this idea 🙇

• the code is a bit messy, and would require some DRYing.
• tested only on OSX

[josevalim]

Thank you @shiroyasha but we don't plan to support those in Elixir itself, as none of the team members actually use it, and that would also open up the possibility for users requiring other formats. If you can maintain them in your repo, it can be very useful for those interested. Thank you!

[shiroyasha]

No problem :) It was only a fun way to get familiar with the codebase, but I shared in case you might be interested in that approach.