Getting started with Node containers

Let's start things off by running the Barely SMS React dev server within a Node.js Docker image. Note that this is not part of the production deployment. This is just a starting point for you to get familiar with deploying Docker containers. As we progress through the remaining sections in this chapter, you'll move steadily toward a production-level deployment.

The first step to getting your React application into a container is creating a Dockerfile. If you don't have Docker installed on your system already, find it here along with installation instructions: https://www.docker.com/community-edition. If you open up a terminal and change into the getting-started-with-containers directory, you'll see a file called Dockerfile. Here's what it looks like:

FROM node:alpine
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm install
COPY . .
EXPOSE 3000
CMD [ "npm", "start" ]

This is the file that's used to build an image. An image is like a template for the container...