My personal neovim environment (neovim + tools) as a Docker image

• Keep track of all external tools, specifically installed for neovim (ctags, syntax checkers, language server protocol,…)
• Keep track of all installed plugins
• Easily deploy your developement environnement on different machine with docker-hub
• Safely try new tools (e.g. language server protocol) in the sandbox environment

cd into your top level project directory, then run the following docker command:

docker run \
  --rm -it \
  [-e UID="1000" \]
  [-e GID="1000" \]
  [-v <your init.vim directory>:/home/neovim/.config/nvim \]
  -v <your workspace top level dir>:/mnt/workspace \
   nicodebo/neovim-docker:latest \
  [nvim arguments]

• Open neovim with file1 and file2 stacked horizontally:

docker run \
    --rm -it \
    -v $(pwd):/mnt/workspace \
    nicodebo/neovim-docker:latest \
    -o file1 file2

• Open neovim with file1 and use your custom neovim configuration stored in the .dotfile directory under your $HOME:

docker run \
    --rm -it \
    -v $(pwd):/mnt/workspace \
    -v $HOME/.dotfiles/nvim:/home/neovim/.config/nvim \
    nicodebo/neovim-docker:latest \
    file1

• File permission issues may arise if the default user id (1000) and group id (1000) of the container does not match user id and group id of the host.

docker run \
    --rm -it \
    -v $(pwd):/mnt/workspace \
    -e UID="1003" \
    -e GID="1004" \
    nicodebo/neovim-docker:latest \
    -o file1 file2

You can find out your host user id and group id with the following command: $ id

For conveniance, you might want to define a function in your shell configuration (bashrc, zshrc,…) to run neovim-docker as an executable, e.g.:

nvim() {
    docker run \
        --rm -it \
        -v $(pwd):/mnt/workspace \
        -v $HOME/.dotfiles/nvim:/home/neovim/.config/nvim \
        nicodebo/neovim-docker:latest \
        "$@"
       }

You must cd into the directory (preferably the top level directory of your project) where the files you want to edit are located.

• https://github.com/bencao/vim_in_docker
• https://github.com/JAremko/alpine-vim
• https://github.com/JAremko/docker-emacs