Starting With Docker – Part 1

Docker?!! What’s that?

Life changing. Okay not quite, but it’s pretty amazing.

Developers typically spend weeks/months/years setting up/tuning their development environment. What happens when a legacy project pops up requiring PHP 5.6 with Memcached? Spin up a virtual box instance, spend an hour configuring it, and (finally) start work?

STOP!! You can be up and running with ANY version of PHP in under 2 minutes? Need an elastic search instance? 1 minute. HA Proxy and 3 backend servers. 30 seconds.

This is where docker comes into play.

Why use Docker?

Occasionally I come across tools that revolutionise the way I work as a developer.  Here’s a small selection of reasons why I use Docker at work (and at home).

• Multiple versions of the same software on the same machine. e.g. MariaDB and MySQL on the same machine
• Hop between legacy projects. Sometimes you can’t update to the latest software version. I have docker containers ready to go on a moments notice.
• New developers on my team are up and running in 15 minutes. No installing/configuring/remembering what we hacked to get it working.
• Everyone’s environment is the same. Very important when working in team.
• You can spin up new containers just for fun (if you’re into that kind of thing).

Quite simply, you need Docker in your life.

Install Docker

Docker works best on Linux (IMO), but the Windows/Mac versions work fine too.

Follow these links and then follow the instructions:

Windows – Click Here

Linux – Click Here

Mac – Click Here

In the next article I’ll give you some quick tips for getting started, troubleshooting specific platform issues and some basic commands to get you going.