A Day in My Setup: Building Full-Stack Apps on a Phone with Docker, Redis, and Codespaces
How I run and test a full-stack automation system with headless Chromium, message queues, and databases—entirely from a phone-based development workflow. Working Within the Constraints When people think of software engineering, they often picture dual 4K monitors, mechanical keyboards, and powerful workstations. But with cloud development environments and the right tooling, the workstation…
Software engineers often picture themselves working at desks with multiple monitors, mechanical keyboards, and powerful computers. However, thanks to cloud development environments and the right tools, engineers can perform heavy work on devices like smartphones. Today, the author contributes to Replex, an open-source video automation tool that relies on Playwright, BullMQ, Redis, MongoDB, Express, and Next.js to autonomously browse websites and record demo reels across various viewports.
The author's setup consists of a local Git repository for editing and quick checks without consuming Codespace quota, a mobile browser (http://localhost:3000) for interacting with the application, GitHub Codespaces in a cloud container with Docker, GNU screen for running the frontend, API server, and worker, and Cloudinary for video pipeline.
To optimize cloud resources, the author writes code and performs initial checks locally on the device before committing and pushing changes to GitHub. Docker is used to spin up Redis and MongoDB, saving time and effort. The author installs dependencies and sets up the frontend, API server, and BullMQ worker using GNU screen, which allows running all services as detached sessions.
Port forwarding is essential to interact with the application from the phone's browser. The author forwards local ports 3000 and 5000 to Codespaces, enabling the phone to access the application running in the Codespace. Verification and end-to-end testing are performed by testing API connectivity and triggering recording jobs.
This setup demonstrates resource optimization by offloading resource-intensive tasks to Codespaces while using the phone for editing and interaction. It also reduces environment management by employing Docker and screen, which handle databases and application processes independently. Despite the constraint of a phone, the workflow does not compromise the quality of work, proving that a phone can be a powerful development tool with the right setup.
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