I can very much recommend that approach. Working in a very small team we're using docker solely for reproducible development environments with very small footprint. Our projects are usually smaller low range backoffice sites.

We're still hesitant to deploy docker in production though, but its on our list. For now we rebuild the production environment from the recipes in the Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml.

Before that we were using VMs with vagrant. I never really liked how ressource intensive and slow they where. And without VM I also don't see the need for Vagrant anymore if I can use docker directly.

So after 2 years of using docker I'm really very happy with our development setup.