Dockerfile Centric Development

At Recall, we work with a large number of different technologies. From Rust in our real-time media pipelines, to Python + Django in our web-server, to C# and C++ for specific meeting platform integrations.

We also use different operating systems during development (Debian Linux or MacOS), and a lot of the code we write needs to interface with system libraries which are easy to install via a package manager, but painful to build from source.

Because of this, there are a huge variety of versioning issues that could occur in our Linux production environment, but not in a MacOS development environment for example. There are also a number of dependencies that don't have pre-built binaries for MacOS, and are difficult to build from source.

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Our Solution

Our solution to this problem is to make our development workflows "Dockerfile Centric". What this means is that:
1. Every project contains a `Dockerfile` with 2 stages, `dev` and `prod`
2. When developing the project, we run the `Dockerfile`, targeting the `dev` stage, and mount the project folder. It's helpful to put this into a script:

bash
	$ cat run-dev-container.sh
  
	#!/bin/bash
	export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1
  
  image_id_file=$(mktemp)
  docker build \
  	--file $(pwd)/Dockerfile \
  	--target dev \
  	--iidfile $image_id_file \
  	.
    
  docker run \
  	--network host \
  	-v $(pwd):/app \
  	-it \
  	$(cat $image_id_file)

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3. We then use VSCode's Remote Development feature to connect to the container.
4. When deploying the project to production, we deploy the same `Dockerfile`, built targeting the `prod` stage.

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