In the previous chapter, you gained a good understanding of what the sample application is, and how to test and run the application in your local development environment. You are now ready to start creating a Docker workflow that will test, build, and package your application into a Docker image.
It is important to understand that whenever you are packaging an application into a Docker image, the best-practice approach is to reduce or eliminate all development and test dependencies from your final packaged application. By my own convention, I refer to this packaged application—free of test and development dependencies—as a release image, which supports the paradigm of continuous delivery, where every successful build should be a release candidate that is able to be published to production if required.
To...