Our modern development environment at Mass.gov

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4 min read

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Jul 23, 2018

I recently worked with the Mass.gov team to transition its development environment from Vagrant to Docker. We went with “vanilla Docker,” as opposed to one of the fine tools like DDev, Drupal VM, Docker4Drupal, etc. We are thankful to those teams for educating and showing us how to do Docker right. A big benefit of vanilla Docker is that skills learned there are generally applicable to any stack, not just LAMP+Drupal. We are super happy with how this environment turned out. We are especially proud of our MySQL Content Sync image — read on for details!

The heart of our environment is the docker-compose.yml. Here it is, then read on for a discussion about it.

Developers use .env files to customize aspects of their containers (e.g. VOLUME_FLAGS, PRIVATE_KEY, etc.). This built-in feature of Docker is very convenient. See our .env.example file:

The most innovative part of our stack is the mysql container. The Mass.gov Drupal database is gigantic. We have tens of thousands of nodes and 500,000 revisions, each with an unholy number of paragraphs, reference fields, etc. Developers used to drush sql:sync the database from Prod as needed. The transfer and import took many minutes, and had some security risk in the event that sanitization failed on the developer’s machine. The question soon became, “how can we distribute a mysql database that’s already imported and sanitized?” It turns out that Docker is a great way to do just this.

Today, our mysql container builds on CircleCI every night. The build fetches, imports, and sanitizes our Prod database. Next, the build does:

That is, we commit and push the refreshed image to a private repository on Docker Cloud. Our mysql image is 9GB uncompressed but thanks to Docker, it compresses to 1GB. This image is really convenient to use. Developers fetch a newer image with docker-compose pull mysql. Developers can work on a PR and then when switching to a new PR, do a simple ahoy down && ahoy up. This quickly restores the local Drupal database to a pristine state.

In order for this to work, you have to store MySQL data *inside* the container, instead of using a Docker Volume. Here is the Dockerfile for the mysql image.

Our Drupal container is open source — you can see exactly how it’s built. We start from the official PHP image, then add PHP extensions, Apache config, etc.

An interesting innovation in this container is the use of Docker Secrets in order to safely share an SSH key from host to the container. See this answer and mass_id_rsa in the docker-compose.yml above. Also note the two files below which are mounted into the container:

Traefik is a “cloud edge router” that integrates really well with docker-compose. Just add one or two labels to a service and its web site is served through Traefik. We use Traefik to provide nice local URLs for each of our services (www.mass.local, portainer.mass.local, mailhog.mass.local, …). Without Traefik, all these services would usually live at the same URL with differing ports.

In the future, we hope to upgrade our local sites to SSL. Traefik makes this easy as it can terminate SSL. No web server fiddling required.

Our repository features a .ahoy.yml file that defines helpful aliases (see below). In order to use these aliases, developers download Ahoy to their host machine. This helps us match one of the main attractions of tools like DDev/Lando — their brief and useful CLI commands. Ahoy is a convenience feature and developers who prefer to use docker-compose (or their own bash aliases) are free to do so.

Our development environment comes with 3 fine extras:

• Blackfire is ready to go — just run ahoy blackfire [URL|DrushCommand] and you’ll get back a URL for the profiling report
• Xdebug is easily enabled by setting the XDEBUG_ENABLE environment variable in a developer’s .env file. Once that’s in place, the PHP in the container will automatically connect to the host’s PHPStorm or other Xdebug client
• A chrome-headless container is used by our suite which incorporates Drupal Test Traits — a new open source project we published. We will blog about DTT soon

Of course, we are never satisfied. Here are a couple issues to tackle: