Now the dev team at work have moved over to using Docker we decided to have some fun.
An internal system we use is based on Drupal7 , the development version of the site has a NGINX / PHP 5.4 container running in front of it. We have been hearing alot about HHVM so why not try building a container and seeing if it our codebase works?
First off, as I prefer to use CentOS, I needed to find a way of getting HHVM installed which wouldn’t take hours (a build from source can notoriously take hours) as I was on the clock. Luckily for me someone had pushed a package to Copr meaning I could do a yum install and quickly adapt the Dockerfile I already had in place for PHP 5.4 changing it from ….
…. to ….
…. and hey presto a working HHVM image. Now all we had to do was change the reference to the container being pulled down in the fig.yml file for the project. After doing a fig stop and then fig rm we did a fig up -d and waited ….
…. yep, it just worked. Within 30 minutes we had decided to try HHVM, built a Docker Image and put it in-front of our codebase.
Due to actually needing to get on with some work we could not do much in-depth testing and simply put the PHP 5.4 container back in front of the codebase.
To achieve this without Docker it would have meant taking the following steps ….
- Commission a new Dev VM
- Install the new software stack
- Configure the new software stack
- Copy the codebase and database backup to the new VM
- Test, play then remove VM
…. all of which would have taken a good few hours of back & forth with the development and operations team.
Finally, this seems as a good as place as any to embed a copy of a presentation I have produced on how we at Reconnix are using Docker ….