workflow for node developing with docker

Question

I'm developing a webapp and I need node for my development environment.

I don't want a docker production container, but a development one: I need to share files between docker container and local development machines. I don't want to run docker each time I change a source file.

Currently my dockerfile is:

#React development
FROM node:4.1.1-wheezy 
MAINTAINER xxxxx
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive
RUN apt-get update && apt-get -y install sudo locales apt-utils
RUN locale-gen es_ES.UTF-8
RUN dpkg-reconfigure locales
RUN echo Europe/Madrid | sudo tee /etc/timezone && sudo dpkg-reconfigure --frontend noninteractive tzdata
ADD src/package.json /tmp/package.json
RUN cd /tmp && npm install
RUN mkdir -p /src && cp -a /tmp/node_modules /src/
WORKDIR /src
EXPOSE 3000
VOLUME /src

I need directory to put all my source files (share a directory via data volume). I also need to execute npm install in my dockerfile so I get my node_modules directory inside my sources directory (/src/node_modules).

However when I mount a host directory as a data volume, as /src dir already exists inside the container's image, its contents will be replaced by the contents of /src directory on the host so I don't have my /src/node_modules directory anymore:

docker run -it  --volumes-from data-container --name node-dev user/dev-node /bin/bash

My host directory doesn't have node_modules directory because I get it through github and is not sync because it's quite a heavy dir.

Answer 1

My solution is to copy node_modules directory using an ENTRYPOINT directive.

docker-entrypoint.sh:

#!/bin/bash
if ! [ -d node_modules ]; then
        cp -a /tmp/node_modules /src/
fi
exec "$@"

2 lines added to dockerfile:

COPY docker-entrypoint.sh /entrypoint.sh
ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint.sh"]

Answer 2

Disclaimer: the following has nothing to do with Docker specifically.

I use SSHFS. The Ubuntu Wiki has a pretty good description:

SSHFS is a tool that uses SSH to enable mounting of a remote filesystem on a local machine; the network is (mostly) transparent to the user.

Not sure if this is useful in your scenario, but all my hosts run a SSH server anyways so it was a no-brainer for me. The win-sshfs project doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore, but it still runs fine in win 8/10 (though the setup is a little weird). OS X and Linux both have better support for this through FUSE.