How to Dockerize a Rails application

When a new developer joins a team, that developer has to get set up with the team’s codebase(s) and get a development environment running. This can often be time-consuming and tedious. I’ve had experiences where getting a dev environment set up takes multiple days. If an application is Dockerized, spinning up a dev environment can be as simple as running a single command.In addition to simplifying the setup of a development environment, Docker can simplify the running of a development environment. For example, in addition to running the Rails server, my application also needs to run Redis and Sidekiq. These services are listed in my Procfile.dev file, but you have to know that file is there, and you need to know to start the app using foreman start -f Procfile.dev. With Docker you can tell it what services you need to run and Docker will just run the services for you.