So I am not a professional programmer, but I do like to tinker with projects and just teach myself stuff (in python and now rust). I currently just install stuff on my linux distro off of the repos or anaconda for python. I’ve never had any particular issue or anything. I was thinking about maybe moving projects into a container just so that they are more cleanly separated from my base install. I am mostly wondering about how the community uses containers and when they are most appropriate and when they are more issue than they are worth. I think it will be good for learning, but want to hear from people who do it for a living.

  • @moonpiedumplings
    5•4 months ago

    I usually use nix to manage my development environments.

    At the root of the git repo for my blog, there is a shell.nix file. This file, shell.nix, declares an entire shell environment, giving me tools, environment variables, and other things I need. I just run nix-shell while in the same directory as the shell.nix file, and it creates that shell environment.

    There are other options, like VSCode has support for developing in a docker container (only docker, not podman or lxc).

    I think lxc/incus (same thing) containers are kinda excessive for this case, because those containers are a full linux system, complete with an init system and whatnot. Such a thing is going to use more resources (ram, cpu, and storage space), and it’s also going to be more to manage compared to application containers (docker, podman), which are typically very stripped down and come with only what is needed to run the application.

    I used to use anaconda, but switched away because it doesn’t have all the packages I wanted, and couldn’t control the versions of packages installed very well, whereas nix does these both very well. Anaconda is very similar in usage though, especially once you start setting up multiple virtual anaconda environments for separate projects. However, I don’t know if anaconda is as portable as nix is, able to create an entire environment from a single file of code.