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193 points dopple | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.388s | source
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nickjj ◴[] No.43745493[source]
Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles.

Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things.

Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too.

This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment.

Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good things over the last 10+ years.

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3abiton ◴[] No.43749807[source]
What is the benefit of this compared to something like incus?
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1. nickjj ◴[] No.43752374[source]
I'm already using Docker for many other things. Launching an ephemeral versioned Debian, Ubuntu or Arch container that's officially supported is a 1 second operation.

I never used Incus before to know if it has other benefits but Docker solves my use case. Before Docker existed I used to do this with LXCs back when I ran my entire dev environment in a Linux VM.