Simplifying Development with Dev Containers

Despite some recent health challenges, I've been working on implementing a simplified development environment for our open-source project. During this process, I stumbled upon the concept of dev containers through an OpenTofu contribution, which opened up new possibilities for my development workflow.

Dev containers integrate seamlessly with both VSCode and IntelliJ, so I decided to explore them further. This journey took a considerable amount of time due to the many moving parts involved, such as Docker Compose and custom Docker images. The complexity increased as I needed to support multiple versions of PHP (8.1, 8.2), various database versions, and different versions of PowerDNS. Additionally, Linux distributions often include older versions of PowerDNS that I also need to support, adding another layer of complexity. To make matters more challenging, some Composer dependencies have dropped support for PHP 8.1.

A notable drawback is that PowerDNS lacks packages for ARM64 Linux or equivalent Docker images. This is particularly inconvenient as I'm developing on a Mac mini with Apple silicon.

Previously, I relied on a custom Docker Compose configuration, which I had tailored to my needs. However, managing different versions of software and testing changes across these versions was often cumbersome. This difficulty was one of the key reasons I sought a new solution.

While this new approach with dev containers doesn't fully meet all my needs and adds some complexity, it has potential. It may even replace the outdated Vagrant configuration in our code repository, which I haven't used extensively.

One positive outcome from my extensive work with Docker is that I gained some valuable insights on how to improve and create a production-ready Docker image. Our main image, initially intended for testing, can now be refined for production use. This improvement could simplify deployments across various Linux distributions, especially where there are version mismatches or services are distributed across different machines.

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