Dockerize your Shell

I install a lot of different programming languages and utilities on my Mac. Doing this manually is painful, so I made a massive Dockerfile to describe my entire dev environment and keep it under configuration control. Now when I start up a terminal shell, it actually launches a docker container that I use for day-to-day tasks.

To make this setup more user-friendly, I taught the container to run certain commands directly on my Mac instead of the container, so commands like open . work from the container as they would if you ran them directly on your Mac. Look at the aliases in bashrc to see how it works and customize the commands. docker commands also work from the container as if it was on your Mac.

Since you probably have a different list of relevant programming languages and utilities than I do, I omitted my specifics and kept it basic. I did install the latest git and hub tools, but this is only meant to get you started. Install whatever you like and make the Dockerfile your own.

Getting Started

Run the following command:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/steveortiz/dockerize-your-shell/master/setup.sh | bash -

Usage

By default, you are brought straight into the dockerized shell. Should you exit the shell, you will see a osx $ prompt. From this prompt, you have a few new aliases.

• dshell will launch a new instance of your dockerized shell.
• dbuild will rebuild your dockerized shell image. Do this after changing your shell's Dockerfile
• dmrestart should be used if your docker machine gets out of sorts. Sometimes this can happen when changing networks. After a dmrestart, you should be able to get back in your shell with dshell
• Within the shell, you also have a few aliases defined. open, atom and mate are a few handy ones. They run a shell script called hostexec that ssh's to your Mac, changes to the equivalent directory and runs the specified command... so it appears as though the command was run directly on your Mac.

Dependencies

hostexec works through the magic of ssh. It assumes you have setup ssh keys. Specifically, the Dockerfile tries to create a symbolic link to ~/.ssh/id_rsa. If you don't have such a file, you can generate one by running ssh-keygen and accepting all the defaults. For ssh to work, you must also enable Remote Login on the Sharing pane of the System Preferences. When you have both of these in place, you should be able to run ssh localhost successfully without being prompted for a password.

It also assumes you have a recent version of Docker installed.

In theory you should be able to do something similar on other platforms, but this assumes you are running Mac OS X.

It also assumes you keep your git and hub configuration in the ~/.config directory. If you use ~/.gitconfig instead, you can run mkdir -p ~/.config/git && mv ~/.gitconfig ~/.config/git/config to fix it.

Customization

After you are setup, customize ~/.dockerize-your-shell/Dockerfile to install anything you like.

TODO: Restore the ability to add other directories.

In addition to apt-get installing more things, you may want to symbolically link more directories from your host to your dockerized shell. In my personal version of this, I link things like Dropbox, Google Drive and others. Look in the Dockerfile at LINK_HOST_DIRS.

Issues

I have been using this setup for the past couple of months, and so far it has worked pretty well for me.

That said, this is my first attempt to share my setup with others, and I modified my scripts and Dockerfile heavily in the process. There also isn't much in the way of error checking or helpful error messages. So please create a GitHub issue if you are having problems with anything. Thank you!