Dock Life: Using Docker for All The Things!

Interesting take by the folks at nystudio107: instead of installing things such as node locally, why not run it in a container with an alias linked to it?

Instead of installing all of the tools & pack­ages you’re used to using, we use Dock­er images that some­one else has cre­at­ed that con­tain these tools & packages.

In order to seam­less­ly pro­vide access to var­i­ous tools run via Dock­er, we’re going to use shell aliases.

For example, to have various node versions available, set up these aliases:

alias node='docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/app -w /app node:18-alpine '
alias node16='docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/app -w /app node:16-alpine '
alias node14='docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/app -w /app node:14-alpine '

With that set up, you can run node script.js as you’d normally do.

Same can be done for other node versions, npm, composer, deno, …

Dock Life: Using Docker for All The Things! →