With the dawn of containerization
Some genius’ figured out how to remove the bloat (operating system files, and misc) and platform incompatibility prone errors by transitioning from virtual machines to containers to host services. Containers brings a more robust, lightweight, nearly platform-agnostic and a fairly quick way to launch services and apps with one or two commands, especially from anywhere. There are several container based software out there on the internet, but Docker is the most popular.
I will show you a quick way how I transformed code of a personal internal website project into a docker image, including with its dependencies and a MongoDB NoSQL database w/ Mongo-Express packaged all together.
To accomplish this, I used:
- NodeJS with HTML/CSS/EJS and Javascript for the website creation
- VS Code as the IDE
- Docker Desktop and its command line interface
- Docker Hub to privately host my image (you could use any other private registry)
Below, you could see a demo of a fully usable website with database connectivity that I’ve created, all running from an image that launched with two other containers for access to the database and its GUI.
This is what they look like while running from my system.
In Docker Desktop
Very cool uh?
My app was configured to not launch without being able to connect to a database first, or else it’ll hang. I’ll have to make that more smooth in the near future.
How mines looks after I’ve gone through the prompt. As you could see, all the dependencies are included and there are scripts included to immediately launch the app.
Now that it is all set, we’re now ready to begin the containerization process. Make sure to clean out whatever unnecessary file and folders you may have accumulated during your coding session, as all of it will be added into the image. You could leave the following folders alone, as VS Code will ignore them when creating the image for you. Don’t worry about the node_modules not getting added, since we want a lightweight image to be able to pull at any moment’s notice. The npm command will be imported into the image, which will pull all the dependencies highlighted in the package.json file.
