Should Fig be on inside of Vagrant VM or outside for OSX?

Question

I've been trying to dig through documentation and youtube videos for Docker, Fig, boot2docker, Vagrant on OSX and unfortunately have encountered many contradictions, or out of date information.

I am attempting to simply get 2 docker containers using Fig working on OSX (app and MySQL). My first question is, is Fig supposed to be run outside of the Vagrant VM (i.e. from the Terminal command line in OSX) or should it be in Vagrantfile so that you "vagrant ssh" and then run fig from inside to launch containers? Or can you do it both ways and are there pros and cons to each?

I'm new to all of this, and I get the fundamentals that Docker is basically sharing the OS, but that OS has to be Linux hence the need for either boot2docker (which spins up Tiny Linux) or Vagrant with Ubuntu or CoreOS or something. It would make more sense then that fig is launched inside of Vagrant SSH because you're basically now emulating what would normally happen if you were running Linux as your native OS on your development machine.

I know you can run fig without Vagrant, but then you lose the folder sync which makes it much harder to use an IDE on OSX for development.

Answer 1

fig should be installed on your host environment, once it is installed e.g. via homebrew, then you configure a fig.yml in the same directory as your dockerfile, and type fig up. More info on the fig website here.

/edit:

So the documentation for dig is a bit on the poor side at the moment but basically both the dockerfile and the fig.yml need to point to the shared directory.

So if your code is in a directory called code which is inside the same directory as your dockerfile and fig.yml make sure it is declared like below in your dockerfile:

ADD . /code
WORKDIR /code

And in the fig.yml it should be defined like this:

volumes:
   - .:/code

So when you run fig up it should be available to the app. There are specific guides available on the fig site for django or rails at the moment.

Answer 2

What I am used to do is

1. Use share folder feature from boot2docker directly (since 1.3.x)

From boot2docker 1.3.x version, share folder is by default supported via VirtualBox Guest additional.

2. fig is installed by boot2docker in MacOS directly, this is installed in MacOS

see http://www.fig.sh/install.html

3. (optional) use fig docker container (it is good for Windows)

see https://github.com/larrycai/docker-images/tree/master/fig