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Spin up your development background processes with ease

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Re: Spin up your development background processes with ease

#2
Porter is a command-line interface (CLI) tool that makes it easy to run background services by adding a few lines to a configuration file. These services are managed by Supervisord, a process control system that ensures that all processes are kept up and running. With Porter, you don't have to manually start and manage background services in multiple terminal tabs. Instead, you can simply use the porter command to manage all of your services in a single place.

Re: Spin up your development background processes with ease

#4
the only advantage over docker that I see is that it doesnt require the overlay fs stuff docker has, but the downside of this is that it doesnt keep its own state. It seems to use system state, such as any global configuration, caches, etc.

I prefer docker compose, simply because its fully reproducible, no matter where I am, and sets up all the tools it uses.

This tools looks like it still requires you to install your tooling - that screams like it will break if you have different distros you run this on, with different versions of tools, etc.

Re: Spin up your development background processes with ease

#5
I was excited about this because I use docker-compose to run a service written in Rust. The final command of the container is “cargo watch -x run” and the compiles take 1-2 minutes per hot reload. Porter solved this by completely sidestepping images, but I’m still considering if this is worth having the user install cargo on their host machine (in the case of porter) and give up hermetic development. Not sure yet, but thanks for this tool!

Re: Spin up your development background processes with ease

#6
This is cool. I've been looking for something like this to pair with my nix env. Docker makes process management and logging in the dev environment so easy, but between the performance issues and abstraction leaks when jumping back and forth between native containers on linux and virtual machines on macos we gave up and started using nix to handle the reproducibility of our dev environment. The only thing I miss is the ease of process/service/log management. If anyone has any other solutions I would love to hear them.

Re: Spin up your development background processes with ease

#10

Does this have any advantages over Docker compose? It does not require Docker, of course, but the reproducibility is going to be much lower. Also, why would you write a tool like this in PHP?

I don't think it has many advantages over Docker compose besides maybe the auto restart option and I'm working on adding file monitoring as well, so you can set files or directories to monitor and once chances occur the service restarts. I don't use Docker locally myself and wanted to have a solution for making it easier to manage background processes and not having to spin up five shells.

Why I wrote a tool like this in PHP is simple, I love PHP and I'm a big fan of the ecosystem / community.

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