Pydock is a utility built on top of docker-compose to enable docker based development from the get go. It enables one to do app development and testing from within a docker container from the very beginning of the app development cycle.

From within the application directory, run pydock init to setup a basic docker based development environment. For example, if you are building an app called my_app which depends on redis, postgres and requires the pyredis, pyscoppg2 and pytest python packages, you can execute

pydock init -d  redis -d postgres  -r pyredis -r pyscoppg2 -r pytest

This will create the necessary setup files required to instantiate a python docker container with dependencies on redis and postgres.

Once the init command has been run - the next step is to run the exec command from within the application folder

pydock exec

The exec command pulls down the necessary containers (in this case, a base python container, a redis container and a postgres container), sets up the necessary network connections between these containers, installs the required pyhton packages in a python development container and gives you a command prompt within this container. Your application directory is also mounted onto this development container. From here on, you can use this terminal to run and test your code just as you would in a normal terminal

Note that if you need to develop with specific versions of python, redis or postgres, you can specify these versions as part of the init command above

pydock init -d  redis:5.0.3  -d postgres:latest  -r pyredis -r pyscoppg2 -r pytest --base-pyhton-image python:3.6

Since pydock pulls containers from docker hub, the version specifiers should match the available image tags on DockerHub

Finally, pydock also provides a build command which builds an application container with a given tag. You might use this command once you are finished developing and are ready to ship your application container

• More robust image cleanup handling
• Provide a push command to to publish a built container to a remote repository
• Ability to handle languages other than python