I use Neovim for all my text editing, and as I'm a web developer I edit a lot of HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript. And not only do I have to switch between different programming/markup languages I also have to switch between different environments, ranging from old Drupal 6 sites on Debian squeeze to a Symfony setup on Debian Jessie to ensure that my code works in production.

Enter Docker

Switching between different versions of Apache/PHP/MySQL and other components is nearly impossible if they are locally installed. In the old dark days I would work on a site directly on the server, then later Vagrant came along and gave a virtual server that could be provisioned like the production server and now Docker gives lightweight containers that allows to quickly switch between different setups.

I use a Docker image that contains all the needed components for the development environment. My docker setup is here http://github.com/henrik-farre/docker. I use a simple script to make interaction easier, it's called "pilotboat".

My Docker image contains Apache, MariaDB, PHP5 with Xdebug, Mailhog and Webgrind. Database data is kept separately in a volume and sites/virtual hosts are kept on the host.

Workflow

I can either drop an existing virtual host file in the vhosts directory, or run pilotboat site-create mydomain.dev which will create a virtual host and directory structure. I use dnsmasq to point the top level domain (.dev) to localhost. If you use NetworkManager just create the following file: /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/dev.conf containing:

address=/dev/127.0.0.1

Then I can checkout the site from git and import a database, which can be done by pilotboat db-import database_name. The command will try to import a file in the databases directory called database_name.sql.gz and the file should have been created by running mysqldump -f --opt -u root -p -c [database_name] | gzip > [database_name.sql.gz], or alternative I use phpMyAdmin which is running in the container on http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

Vim / Neovim

The only special setup for Vim is connecting Xdebug in the container to Vdebug, and map paths from inside the container to the local file system: 

let g:vdebug_options = {"path_maps": {"/var/www": "/path/to/pilotboat/sites"}, "break_on_open": 0, "watch_window_style": "compact", "server" : "172.17.0.1", "port": 9000}

I try to make Neovim do as much work for me as possible, and I use the following plugins to help me with that:

  • Vdebug: Debug PHP code step by step
  • Emmet: Expands div#header > ul.menu > li*5 to real HTML
  • UltiSnips: Advanced snippet expanding, useful for quickly typing PHP functions complete with PHP doc comments
  • YouCompleteMe: Great for completing the current programming languages native functions and vars
  • delimitMate: Automatically insert matching brackets, parentheses and more
  • Surround: Wraps words in ' or * or other characters
  • NERD Commenter: Comment/Uncomment single lines or blocks
  • Neomake: Automatically asynchronous syntax checking, works with PHP lint, PHP Mess Detector and PHP_CodeSniffer

You can find my Neovim setup here: http://github.com/henrik-farre/vimrc