A few months ago I got a new computer and I have been very intentional about deciding what I install on it. From past experience I know that computers that are used as a development environment tend to get messy in no time since one might install all kinds of libraries, frameworks, dependencies, you name it, and to makes matters worse, you will probably run into version conflicts for any or most of those things. Hardly ever a development environment is a clean environment and I don’t know about you but there are very few things that I find more frustrating than wasting time troubleshooting development environment set up. Let me write the code already!

When I need to create a new custom Docker image, I usually start with a base image (alpine, debian, python, etc, depending on the project), running it in the interactive mode and install the tools and dependencies I will need. Once I get my container the way I want, I create a Dockerfile with all the commands I ran inside my container. It works, but I just learned that this might be unnecessary extra work.

In a large web application, the backend logs can get quite verbose: requests created, sent, processed, received, etc. The list can grow large very quickly depending on how logs are implemented.

I wrote a very simple right-to-the-point Docker introduction post if you’re new to Docker.

If you want to see your code changes applied right away to a running Docker container, you need to make sure to run the container using the share volumes tag: -v (or --volume).

Docker has been around for a few years but it sounded too complicated and I never knew exactly what problem it was solving. Only recently I learned about it and started using Docker both at work and on my personal projects.