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Very useful for testing purposes
August 27, 2018

Very useful for testing purposes

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Docker

We use Docker mainly for testing purposes. To avoid issues with local environments while testing our site, we use Docker images. This has many benefits: you can easily add/remove configurations and extras. For example on PHP you can try different images with different versions of PHP. Trying to achieve this on your localhost (for example with XAMPP or something more friendly) is very time-consuming.

I should say I know Docker is meant for something more pro and I'm a light user; I don't push a Docker image completely to a server, but for testing purposes it has been extremely useful. You can use CLI for changing things, you can create different databases, alter them and load them again, etc.
  • Creating and deleting "server" images is way easier than normal. You can change configurations and it basically creates a virtual machine on your computer, but WAY easier than using VMWare yourself. It's a layer on top of that.
  • Getting images is pretty easy, there are many on the internet and you can get help from the community in some cases you are not sure what to do
  • The commands in Docker work pretty well. There is good documentation and you can achieve almost anything considering a virtual machine.
  • Maintaining stability between environments thanks to the Docker app. You can have the SAME exact app on different systems (MacOS vs Win) and it will behave 99% the same.
  • As a NON-heavy user, definitely it's a bit intimidating in the onboarding phase. It's hard to understand what everything is for and how to use it appropriately. As I wrote before, this could be because I'm not a hard developer myself.
  • At least on Windows 10, I always have problems turning it on. It has problems starting, I need to quit/start again, and then it works. I'm supposed to have a stable version, not sure if it's only myself.
  • We are able to try things very quickly compared to before. If you need to debug it, changes on X/Y/Z will have an impact on the way your app works, and changing libraries or configurations of the environment easily can improve your development cycles.
  • In case someone new arrives, the onboarding is pretty easy thanks to Docker. We have tried many configs and images until we reached a point were we have what we want. We don't have to painfully do that again for every new user. We just send him the image.
We've used XAMPP, PHPmyAdmin and similar local environments (our app is on PHP).

Because of how easy you can change the configuration of libraries on PHP and versions (which is SO painful on XAMPP or other friendly LAMP local servers) we are using Docker right now. Also, being sure that the environment is exactly the same makes things easier for developing.
My use case is different from the "main" use case, but for me, Docker is great if you want to test different apps easily in local environments. I have never pushed an app to a server, but testing, creating, and deleting servers with different configurations with 2 commands is DEFINITELY easier than how I did it before. Creating environment variables and many configurations that can be shared across a simple file definitely makes things easier.

If you, like me, know something about developing but very little about Linux and distributions, be ready to test a lot of things and have a hard time achieving what you want. That's not Docker's fault, it's because it's meant for other users who are more "experts" in that field.