Devbox is a dockerized python development environment.

I was having trouble with DLL loading on my Mac, so decided to develop in a Linux box, where things work as expected. This is the initial result of that experimentation. There are lots of problems still in need of addressing, but this should suffice for getting started.

1. Clone this repo.
2. Add your stuff to /src
3. Run ./build
4. Run ./enter
5. Now you're in a Linux box with your source files. Have fun!

This assumes that you have Docker installed. After you install Docker, make sure that your shell is configured to find the Docker host, so that commands like docker build and docker run will be able to find the Docker daemon and pass the container for it to execute.

• Dockerfile is the Docker manifest. It contains the recipe for building the Docker image, the thing that subsequently gets executed to create a Docker container (this image/container distinction is analogous to the program/process distinction).

• build rebuilds the image. Run this when the source changes.

• enter dumps you into the Devbox. Must ./build before entering.

• src/ contains the application files (it's like web in dev).

• shared/ is a (wait for it...) shared directory between your box and the container. It's "mounted" inside the container in /shared.

  • shared/requirements.txt This contains the state of Python packages. If a package is not on this list, Devbox won't have them installed, so make sure packages of interest are declared here.

    When you make new pip installs, make sure you freeze the list of installed packages and overwrite this file. I assume you can do this responsibly. If you screw this file up, please recover the original from the git history.

  • shared/variables This contains key environment variables. Right now it uselessly sets up virtual environment stuff, but can be used to declare application-specific settings, such as the place where you want your web server to dump its logs.

• config/.bashrc overwrites the bashrc in the container, so is used to source the above mentioned variables. You might ask why not just declare variables inside the .bashrc? This file might accidentally be made public, so I just want to make sure that variables, which may contain secret information, are given a little more special treatment.

• Storing virtual environments in /shared creates a git problem. Not having virtual environments sucks.
• New packages can be installed, but the list must be frozen and stored in /shared/requirements.txt, since the image is immutable.