dockerfile-rails VS docker-projects

If you want to automatically generate Dockerfiles for more versions of Rails (not just the latest) that detect OS packages that need to be installed from gems present in your Gemfile, check out https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails

You can install it in your rails app by running:

1. bundle add dockerfile-rails

2. rails g dockerfile

> I felt bad

Don't. I can honestly say that I didn't write this post targeting HN. I'll go further... this post wasn't meant for people who are unlikely to use https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails#overview. I recently added some features to that gem whose usage may not be intuitively obvious. I wrote this post to explain some of the motivation for those features.

I don't know how to mark posts as not intended for HN (and truth be told, if there was such a feature, I'd be inclined to overuse it). I don't know where else I should have posted this content, but I'm not sure I would be inclined to move it. In any case, this post, as written, serves a purpose for me. Somebody not you and not me felt it belonged here. We can both second guess that decision. Either way, there is no reason for either of us to feel bad.

Did you try migrating with this guide? https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-herok...

The issues you ran into with older versions of Rails was probably because the Dockerfile that `fly launch` generated was for new versions of Rails. We switched to https://github.com/rubys/dockerfile-rails to streamline Dockerfile generation and support older versions of Rails.

If you try it again and run into issues you can open an issue at https://github.com/rubys/dockerfile-rails/issues or post in https://community.fly.io and somebody will help get that sorted out.

The more versions of Rails we can deploy the better!

At the moment Rails is focused on simplicity/readability. I've got a gem that I'm proposing (and DHH is evaluating) that adds caching as an option: https://github.com/rubys/dockerfile-rails#overview

even though the article does not go deep into multistage builds Fly.io does provide cookbooks and even a link to a Rails generator there.

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.