We tried several approaches to get a workable development environment and Docker’s NFS has been the most performant.

The trouble with running a Rails app in dev mode is there are lots of small files being reloaded regularly. We found it took 10+ seconds for some endpoints to finish loading. With NFS it was nearer 1–3 seconds.

This setup is far from ideal but it’s still faster this way than running via the native OSX filesystem.