Single-line Onboarding Using Docker Compose

All my career, I’ve worked at various startups that have had a very similar onboarding strategy. Because the company (and product) is small enough, it’s reasonable to ask the engineers to run the entirety of the product locally on their machine for development. If this sounds familiar, the following steps might also sound familiar: <ol> <li>Download the (correct version) of the backend language</li> <li>Download the (correct version) of NPM/Node for the frontend</li> <li>Download the package manager for the backend</li> <li>Download the package manager for the frontend</li> <li>Download the (correct version) of the DB to run locally</li> <li>(optionally) download the other non-primary storage DBs (e.g. ElasticSearch, Redis)</li> <li>Install the frontend and backend dependencies</li> <li>Start the frontend server</li> <li>Start the backend server</li> <li>Start other backend processes (e.g. async workers), if needed</li> <li>Debug failures and undocumented dependencies and return to step 6</li> </ol> This process is tiring, but expected. Setting up a development environment is something that takes between a few hours and a few days and should not have to be repeated. Unfortunately, it’s also difficult to help others because computers, languages and versions change over time so they may run into errors you didn’t encounter or you might have forgotten the errors you did encounter when you set up your environment 6 months prior. Surely there is a better way. <h2>The Shortcut: Docker Compose</h2> About a year ago I took a course on Udemy that covered Docker and deployment orchestration. While I’ve used Docker pretty extensively in my roles, it’s almost always been for the purpose of managing deployed environments (typically via AWS ECS). Docker Compose was new to me, and I hadn’t tried to learn much about it before the course. I found the official documentation daunting and too unclear to sell me on its benefits. The course, however, quickly displayed how powerful Docker Compose could be with a relatively simple YAML file. Instead of needing to install the various dependencies on my host machine, I could define a few containers with the same versions of libraries and languages used in production. I could then run one command to spin up all the containers that I needed <a href="https://medium.com/singularity-energy/single-line-onboarding-using-docker-compose-971aa6ce8a">Visit Now</a>