Docksal: More Dev, Less Ops

Sean Dietrich

You’re a developer. Which means you didn’t sign up to be a devops engineer or a server admin. Your sweet spot is building Drupal sites, themes, and modules, not maintaining the boxes that house them. But in today’s development workflows, the ability to manage and maintain local environments with an endless variety of configurations is a critical (and painful) part of your development process. These days, whether you’re a lone developer or part of a team, one of the biggest hassles is often just getting your local set up so that you can start contributing to projects. Manual setups are tedious and prone to configuration discrepancies. Virtual machines can take forever to run, rarely seem to deliver on a one-command setup, and can hog unnecessary machine resources. Enter Docksal, a container-based, open-source tool that defines and manages Docker based development environments. Docksal ensures that all developers are using the same software versions, regardless of their individual environments. It’s compatible with MacOS, Linux, and Windows. Docksal projects are incredibly fast to spin up, and switching between multiple projects can be done with ease. Using Docksal means you’ll never have to hear “it works on my local” again. Attendees will leave with ... A comprehensive understanding of the Docksal project. A concrete list of ways Docksal can improve your productivity as a developer and as a development team. Information about customizing Docksal and tailoring containers to specific projects. Best practices for creating a Docksal-enabled project, applying Docksal to an existing project. A new appreciation for the "one command and done" approach to local site setup.

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