Tips and tricks

HTTP Proxy and DNS

The HTTP Proxy and DNS used in dinghy is available as a standalone project dinghy-http-proxy. The proxy is based on jwilder’s excellent nginx-proxy project, with modifications to make it more suitable for local development work. A DNS resolver is also added. By default it will resolve all *.docker domains to the Docker VM, but this can be changed.

SSH-Agent Forwarding

If you need to access some private git repos or ssh servers, it could be useful to use have a ssh-agent accessible from your containers. whilp/ssh-agent helps you to do so easily.

Running composer or other tools like if they were on the host

If you run composer and other tools directly in containers, you could use a combination of the autoenv zsh plugin and a simple wrapper script to run it easily directly from the host. In your project folder, create a .autoenv.zsh file with the name of your container:

autostash COMPOSER_CONTAINER='project_fpm_1'

then create a simple function in your .zshrc:

composer () {
    if [ ! -z $COMPOSER_CONTAINER ]; then
      docker exec -it ${COMPOSER_CONTAINER} /usr/local/bin/composer --working-dir=/src -vv "$@"
      /usr/local/bin/composer "$@"

Ignore files in your IDE

It’s a good idea to add the temporary sync files to your IDE’s ignore list to prevent your IDE from indexing them all the time or showing up in search results. In case of unison and PHPStorm for example just go to Preferences -> File Types -> Ignore files and folders and add .unison to the pattern.

Don’t sync everything

You should only sync files that you really need on both the host and client side. You will see that the sync performance will improve drastically when you ignore unnecessary files. How and which files to ignore depends on your syncing strategy (rsync/unison/…) and your project.

Example for a PHP Symfony project using unison:

# docker-sync.yml
        - "-ignore='Path .idea'"          # no need to send PHPStorm config to container
        - "-ignore='Path .git'"           # ignore the main .git repo
        - "-ignore='BelowPath .git'"      # also ignore .git repos in subfolders such as in composer vendor dirs
        - "-ignore='Path var/cache/*'"    # don't share the cache
        - "-ignore='Path var/sessions/*'" # we don't need the sessions locally
        - "-ignore='Path node_modules/*'" # remove this if you need code completion
        # - "-ignore='Path vendor/*'"     # we could ignore the composer vendor folder, but then you won't have code completion in your IDE