When we want to experiment with some progamming language or particular framework. It’s bit painful to install them into our own development machine. Cuz we may not end up using the language and ended up bloat our machine.

Docker helps to reduce that pain. We can get a bash console

Example, say we want to work with Elixir, simply run this:

docker run --rm -it -v `pwd`:/app elixir /bin/bash -l

Now we have a bash session in a container with Elixir and we can invoke any Elixir command.

Usually we want to run a web server. We can do this:

docker run --rm -it -v `pwd`:/app -p 4000:4000 elixir /bin/bash -l

Now we can run Phoeni and hit 127.0.0.1:4000 as if we were working on host machine.

But getting run these command every time is boiler plate. Let’s intergrate them into our shell. Put this in your shell rc file, or anywhere it can be loaded automatically.

docker_repl() {
  docker run --rm -it -v `pwd`:/app $@ /bin/bash -l
}

Now, you simple run:

docker_repl -p 4000:4000 elixir
docker_repl -p 3000:3000 crystallang/crystal

And voila, you have full access to language runtime and your code in /app