Batect continues to gain traction among our developers and is considered by many to be a default approach for configuring local development and test environments. This open-source tool (which happens to be developed by a Thoughtworker) makes it easy to set up and share a build environment based on Docker. Batect then becomes the entry point for your build system, replacing the ubiquitous go script as the basis for a “check out and go” approach. Batect continues to evolve in response to developer feedback and recently added support for Docker's BuildKit and shell tab completion.
So much energy and effort continue to be wasted on configuring local development environments and troubleshooting the "works on my machine" problem. For many years our teams have adopted the "check out and go" approach where we use a scripted approach to ensure the local development environment is configured consistently. batect is an open source tool developed by a ThoughtWorker that makes it easy to set up and share a build environment based on Docker. batect becomes the entry point script for your build system, launching containers to perform build tasks that don't rely at all on local setup. Changes to build configuration and dependencies are simply shared through source control without requiring any changes or installations on local machines or CI agents. While we like Cage, among other tools, in this space, we see batect quickly growing in favor with our teams.
