How to write an application that can be run separately or inside a container
Perhaps you work in a company where developers are fond of microservices. In a microservice world, you might need literally dozens of separate small applications to be constantly running in order for your tech stack to be fully functional.
I’ve generally had some success launching infrastructure (databases, message queues, and proxy servers) via Docker. But I’m also curious if Docker would work for my particular use case — I would like to run most of my microservices in docker containers, but keep the one thing I’m actively developing running in my IDE.
After a bit of experimentation, I found some approaches that worked well for me. So let me walk through what I learned while experimenting with an environment where I mixed containers with locally run software.