We have about 5 webapps that we need to run concurrently for various parts of our development, and this gets us there fast. My team is able to get up and running on a just unpacked laptop within about 20 minutes after installing XCode. The dev-with-docker-on-ubuntu solution is an attempt to give users a native feeling docker environment with a readily disposable/rebuildable development environment. While 2-way rsyncing gave native performance and choice of editing/work environment, it created other issues for synchronization and introduced some brittle overhead. So, this newest solution is the best setup I've been able to construct that gives you complete choice in editing tools on your OSX machine, while giving native performance with apps and keeping the convenience of fs events for your development workflow. Because NFS doesn't support fs eventing, exporting the FS from OSX to the linux guest doesn't work if you want code edits to trigger rebuilds or spec running in the docker guest. I authored the solution after spending weeks getting a docker-machine solution with 2-way syncing via rsync running with configs that supported the generation of fsevents/inotify events on both the OSX and linux side of the equation.

I've spent plenty of time with docker-machine, docker for mac, and ultimately found those solutions lacking or broken.

Docker on mac slow