The Blackfire.io PHP debugging service (from SensioLabs) has a new post to thier blog today talking about how the service makes use of Docker to build the environments for testing out their users' code.

As you may know, Blackfire was represented at the SymfonyLive conference in Paris. During this event, several people came to us and asked how we use Docker at Blackfire.io. One of our goals is to make profiling straightforward for anyone, and it means that we need to be able to easily test our product on a lot of different platforms. And Docker gives us the ability to spin up new containers in milliseconds.

Moreover, our website relies a lot on different tools, so containers can also help us reach an iso-production development environment. But Docker is only available on Linux and a big part of the Blackfire's team is using MacOS X. So how one using MacOS X can use the best of both worlds?

The post goes on to talk about their use of the boot2docker tool and how they can use it to help with the environment customization most developers want out of their testing. They show how it updates the network settings, works with file sharing, allows for multiple domain names/containers and solutions to some other common issues including no container access, no name resolution and a "bonus" section with a Skydock plugin for custom DNS naming.