The way it works is that creates a Docker volume and then listens on file changes on the host machine and whenever it detects any file changes, it synchronizes the two. You can either set up synchronization sessions yourself or use their docker-compose integration. Mutagen is a fast file synchronization utility that was inspired by Unison and partially Syncthing and tries to require as little configuration as possible. Like I’ve mentioned before, Docker for Mac developers tried using Mutagen for a while. The other problem is that it does not propagate any filesystem events, meaning you need to rely on polling to detect changes within your application (spring, Rails autoloader, etc.) which is always slower and requires more CPU. As such, it’s fine for moderately sized projects or apps that do not require much I/O but it definitely was not enough for Rails. Usually, it’s also pretty reliable but unfortunately has one big drawback - the disk access time for the app running in the container is still slower than native which causes both the boot time and every request to take more time. It’s supported by default by Docker and requires just a bit of extra setup to work. NFSĪnother common alternative that works without bringing any external tools is using NFS. Not only that but the main reason it was created was because of reliability and CPU issues of the previous solutions and not to drastically improve the I/O performance so it doesn’t help us much with larger applications either. gRPC-FUSE is still painfully slow slow but also unreliable, using lots of CPU, randomly failing and keeps getting broken between even patch versions of D4M. Unfortunately, it turned out the cure was worse than the sickness. After a brief trial run with mutagen (more on that later) they decided to instead roll their own solution and gRPC-FUSE was born. Knowing the problems of the osxfs approach, Docker developers tried to find an alternative. We’re talking several minutes to even launch the app and then several seconds for every request - completely unusable! gRPC FUSE The moment you run a mature Rails application, this approach completely falls apart - it not only uses quite a lot of CPU, but it’s also painfully slow. Unfortunately, this solution is insufficient for anything other than very very simple applications. To work around this, Docker for Mac developers came up with osxfs. This means we cannot natively mount the host filesystem in the container since it’s a completely separate operating system. It works this problem around by running a tiny Linux kernel in a virtual machine and then running all the containers there instead. This is the old default way of mounting the local directory inside a Docker container on Mac.ĭue to the operating system differences, Docker for Mac cannot run its apps and containers the same way as it does so on Linux. Recently I decided to research different alternatives to synchronizing the files between a host Mac machine and the containers to improve the performance and CPU use of our development environment. So, you can probably share data between all your devices.When working on our application in Helpling, at some point in the past we migrated from Vagrant to Docker to take advantage of the containerized approach and make updating parts of our stack easier. You can also find both official and unofficial versions on Android and iOS. SyncThing is available on most OSes, from Windows and Linux to FreeBSD. SyncThing can be the solution to those problems. That's slower and more unreliable than a direct connection among your devices, and also means you're giving access to your data to a third party. The problem with such cloud services, though, is that they rely on third-party servers. For that, you have to use something like Dropbox or Google Drive. However, although such solutions allow you to access files on a device from another, they don't sync them. If you're in a multi-device household and need to access the same data from Windows, Macs, iOS devices, or even gaming consoles, you could set up a network shared folder on Ubuntu with Samba. If you're a fan of Apple's devices, we saw in the past how you can use AirDrop to transfer files from an iPhone to a Mac. So, let's see how you can use it to share your data between your own devices, with no third parties peeking over your shoulder.
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