Why Dusty?

We built Dusty to be a great way to run a development environment. We've tried to learn from the existing solutions out there and make improvements where we could. Here, we'll briefly go over a few reasons why we think you'll love Dusty more than the alternatives.

vs. Vagrant

Vagrant is a very powerful tool that makes it easy to provision a virtual machine. Vagrant is often used in conjunction with configuration management software like Chef or Puppet in order to coordinate state changes across many users.

Compared to Vagrant, Dusty has the following advantages:

  • Isolation: With Docker containers, each service you run is fully isolated. If you have three versions of Postgres running across production, Dusty can easily emulate that for you on your local environment. This would be very difficult with most Vagrant setups.
  • Ease of Updating: By default, Dusty makes sure it has the latest version of its specs whenever you run dusty up. If someone changes a service in your stack and pushes a change to the specs, Dusty will set that up for you automatically.
  • Efficiency: Dusty's mix and match capability allows you to run only the apps you need at any given time. Switching apps is very easy and supported out of the box. To do this in Vagrant would require heavy scripting through a configuration management tool.

vs. Docker Compose

We love Docker Compose, and Dusty actually uses Compose to orchestrate container lifecycles. By itself, however, Compose has some shortcomings that we've tried to address with Dusty.

  • OS X Support: Using Docker on OS X introduces a virtual machine between your host OS and your containers, and navigating that extra layer is often painful. It takes a lot of effort to see a container's web service in a browser running on your Mac, or to get files between your Mac and the container. Dusty solves these problems (see following section on OS X Support).
  • Simplified Specs: Compose's specs model is fairly static. You write a large Composefile with all the containers for a specific bundle of apps. It's difficult to share service configuration across these large files. Dusty simplifies the specs model: each container is defined in exactly one place, then the containers you need are stitched together at runtime.
  • Mix and Match: Dusty's simplified specs model makes it trivial to run exactly the containers you need and no others. Define each container once, then tell Dusty what you want to run. It'll handle the dependency graph.

OS X Support

Dusty delivers the power and flexibility of Docker to OS X. Here are the biggest improvements we've made to running vanilla boot2docker on your Mac:

  • Port Forwarding: Dusty uses nginx to rig up host name and port forwarding all the way from your Mac into a running container. You define the host name, host port, and container port in the container's spec, then Dusty does the rest at runtime.
  • rsync: Dusty uses rsync for all file transfer operations between your Mac and the boot2docker VM. This is unbelievably fast compared to VirtualBox Shared Folders, which boot2docker uses out of the box.
  • File Transfers: Dusty provides the dusty cp command to copy files between your local filesystem and containers. This can even copy files directly between two running containers.

Built for Development Environments

Dusty is explicitly built to be a tool for development environments.

  • Isolated Tests: Dusty lets you write your test command in the specs, then anyone using the specs can run the tests with a simple dusty test command. You can also specify disposable service containers to use for the tests. Getting a fresh database instance for your tests is simple.
  • Share Common Tasks: Does your app have a complicated build process or some state that needs to be managed through scripts? Write the script once, then everyone can use it through a dusty scripts command.
  • Docker Available, but Batteries Included: Everything you can already do with Docker will work just fine with Dusty. We've made some very common commands, like running a shell, directly available through the Dusty CLI so you don't have to learn Docker to get started.