Dockerlive : A live development environment for Dockerfiles

The process of developing Dockerfiles is perceived by many developers as slow and based on trial-and-error, and it is hardly immediate to see the result of a change introduced into a Dockerfile. In this work we propose a plugin for Visual Studio Code, which we name Dockerlive, and that has the purpose of shortening the length of feedback loops. Namely, the plugin is capable of providing information to developers on a number of Dockerfile elements, as the developer is writing the Dockerfile. We achieve this through dynamic analysis of the resulting container, which the plugin builds and runs in the background.