artodeto's blog about coding, politics and the world

I have to maintain a big bunch of repositories with different languages and different language versions.

After some iterations, I came up with a simple idea by using docker for it. To ease up things for any kind of users who have to deal with this code (even qa), the last iteration is to add a "startdockercontainer.sh" script into the repository.

Following an example script for a php repository.
Given is, that the script is located in <project_root>/bin.
Given is, that the docker file exists in <project_root>/data/docker.

#!/bin/bash
####
# Starts a fitting container and creates image if needed.
#
# @todo
####
# @author stev leibelt <artodeto@bazzline.net>
# @since 2018-05-09
####

PATH_OF_THIS_SCRIPT=$(cd $(dirname "$0"); pwd)
DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME='my_php_application'
DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG='0.1.0'

if ! (docker image ls | grep -q "${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}\s\+${DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG}")
then
    PATH_TO_THE_DOCKER_SOURCE=$(realpath ${PATH_OF_THIS_SCRIPT}/../data/docker)
    echo ":: We have to build the docker container first."
    echo ":: Please do the following steps first."
    #this is usefull since you have to copy some ssh keys to a path
    # or configure some files.

    read -p ":: Hit <ENTER> to continue."                                                                                                                       

    docker build -t ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}:${DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG} ${PATH_TO_THE_DOCKER_SOURCE}
fi

docker container run --mount type=bind,source="${PATH_OF_THIS_SCRIPT}"/..,target=/application -it ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}:${DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG} /bin/ash

And thats it. If the image is not found on the host, we have to setup things and build the image. Afterwards we start the container and mount the repository code into /applicationof the container.

Miles English has published a beautiful text to demonstrate how bad agil development can be if you are doing things totally wrong (and at the end, sadly this is the common way of building software :-(). He illustrates the agil approach by start building a house without knowing how this should look like.
The sad truth is, that dishonesty is build up from this approach. The development team starts doing things secretly to fix the flaws they had to build. The consequence of this is, that even simple task are taking more time then expected (because of the hidden refactoring) which in turn disgusts the management.
At the end, both side are talking but no one is listening because no one is trusting the other sides words.