Docker Development Workflows That Actually Work

Docker is supposed to make your environment reproducible. In practice, a lot of teams end up with Dockerfiles that work in CI, break in local dev, and require a tribal knowledge ritual to get running. The tooling is powerful — the gap is in how it's used.

A single-stage Dockerfile that copies everything into the image is the root cause of most Docker frustrations. It makes images large, slow to rebuild, and impossible to optimize for both development and production.