Rant: Docker is a labyrinth maze of brick walls and show-stopping issues that has done nothing but slow my development

unknown user
2019-08-04T02:26:25Z

Firstly, I apologise for the rant. I guess this is a meek follow-up to my submission earlier in ~comp, questioning how to deploy Docker into production. Since then, I haven't been able to dedicate much time to solving any of the issues I've outlined in that thread, but what I will say is that docker has caused me nothing but pain, and I have realised zero benefits from attempting to utilise it. Right from the start, the syntax for docker, docker-compose, and Dockerfiles is confusing and full of edge cases which no one explains to you in the hype of actually discussing it:

These 'images' you build grow to insane sizes unless you carefully construct and regiment your RUN, COPY, and other commands.

Docker complains to you about leaving empty lines in multi-line RUN commands (which is itself, as I see it, basically a hack to get around something called a "layer limit"), even if it contains a comment (which is not an empty line) and does not provide a friendly explanation on how to solve this issue.

There's basically no good distinction between bind mounts and volumes, and the syntax is even more confusing: declaring a volumes entry in a docker-compose.yml? You have no good idea if you're creating a volume or a bindmount.

Tutorials & documentation tends to either assume you're a power user who knows this sort of thing, or are so trivial they don't accurately represent a real-world solution, and are therefore basically useless.

I've suffered endless permissions issues trying to run portions of my application, such as being unable to write to log files, or do trivial things like clearing a cache—that I have tried a dozen different ways of fixing with zero success.

Then, when I run some things from within the docker container, such as tests, they can take an excruciatingly long time to run—only then did I discover that this is yet another docker issue. The whole point of docker is to abstract away the host OS and containerise things and it can't even do that.

So now I'm regenerating and rebuilding images and containers every 5 minutes trying to find a configuration that appears to work with the slow and complicated syntax of docker rm $(docker ps -aq) -f followed by docker rmi $(docker images -q) followed by docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d, followed by docker container exec -it php sh.

Docker-sync, kubernetes, docker-compose, images, containers. It's legitimately too much. I'm not a dev-ops or infrastructure guy. I just want to write code and have my app work. I don't have the money to employ anyone to solve this for me (I'm not even employing myself yet).

I guess you can say I've learnt my lesson. I'm sticking to git and a simple VPS for future endeavours. I don't know how you folks who manage to hype docker do it, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but Docker doesn't like me, and I don't like it.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~comp/g98/rant_docker_is_a_labyrinth_maze_of_brick_walls_and_show_stopping_issues_that_has_done_nothing_but

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Comments: 13