bgems VS docker-projects

One problem you're likely to run into is that systems using the same packaging lineage cut the same dependency up in different ways. The "right name" for a dependency can change between Ubuntu and Debian, between different releases of Ubuntu, and different architectures. It very quickly gets out of hand for any interesting set of dependencies. Now it might be that there's enough stability in the repositories these days that that's less true than it was, but I remember running into some really annoying cases at one point when I had a full gem mirror to play with.

This is one of those problems that sounds easy but gets really fiddly. I had a quick run at it from a slightly different direction a looooong time ago: binary gems (https://github.com/regularfry/bgems although heaven knows if it even still runs). Precompiled binary gems would dramatically speed up installation at the cost of a) storage; and b) getting it right once. The script I cobbled together gathers the dependencies together into a `.Depends` file which you can just pipe through to the package manager, and could happily use to strap together a package corresponding to the dependency list.

I've never really understood why a standard for precompiled gems never emerged, but it turns out it's drop-dead simple to implement. The script does some linker magic to reverse engineer the dpkg package dependency list from a compiled binary. I was quite pleased with it at the time, and while I don't think it's bullet-proof I do think it's worth having a poke at for ideas. Of course it can only detect binary dependencies, not data dependencies or anything more interesting, so there's still room for improvement.

I have my own local development Rails setup and template files that could be dropped in any project with minimal changes (mostly around configuring the db connection)

- https://gitlab.com/sdwolfz/docker-projects/-/tree/master/rai...

Haven't spent the time to document it. But the general idea is to have a `make` target that orchestrates everything so `docker-compose` can just spin things up.

I've used this sort of thing for multiple types of projects, not just Rails, it can work with any framework granted you have the right docker images.

For deployment I have something similar, builds upon the same concepts (with ansible instead of make, and focused on multi-server deploys, terraform for setting up the cloud resources), but not open sourced yet.

Maybe I'll get to document it and post my own "Show HN" with this soon.