Big thanks to ScoutAPM for sponsoring my blog’s Ruby and Rails performance related content. If you want to give Scout a try, you can check them out

asdf and Docker for Managing Local Development Dependencies

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2021-08-17 12:00:10

Big thanks to ScoutAPM for sponsoring my blog’s Ruby and Rails performance related content. If you want to give Scout a try, you can check them out here:

Have you ever updated a database for one project just to discover that you accidentally broke another? Ensuring the isolation between your local dependencies can save you hours of rolling back a breaking update or resolving intertwined dependencies. In this blog post, I describe how you can manage your local development stacks using Docker containers and asdf.

Before, I’ve used Homebrew to manage my local dependencies, e.g., PostgreSQL database. Many tutorials recommend it as a quick & easy way to install packages on MacOS. One critical issue of this approach is that it does not permit the installation of different versions at the same time. Also, specifying a granular minor version is not straightforward.

I’ve finally decided to ditch using Homebrew for managing development dependencies after the update of the Vim package somehow bumped my local PostgreSQL major version… It resulted in cumbersome data restoration and a couple of wasted hours.