Docker Node.js best practices 🐳 📦

Docker Node.js development to production best practices with security in mind.

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What is this?

This is a set of good defaults and best practices when working with Node.js and Docker.

Advantages for dev

• Efficient images - Only NPM packages are installed inside the container.
• Zero config startup - Use abstracted commands to build and start your app.
• Debugging support - Node runs with the inspect flag on the standard port (9229) and VSCode integration provided.
• Easy local/Docker development - Ability to run your app both within Docker and locally without conflicts with NPM packages.
• Nodemon - Automatically restart Node on file changes.
• Edit locally while running Docker - Source code is bind mounted into the container.
• Configurable environment variables - Edit the .env file to customise your app.

Advantages for prod

• Single place to upgrade Node.js version - Node.js version declared once which is shared across all environments
• Only prod dependencies - No dev dependencies included in the final prod image.
• Correct NODE_ENV - NODE_ENV defaults to production both at build time and runtime.
• Proper shutdown - Graceful shutdown of Node.js using stoppable.
• Security - Node runs as the user node rather than root.
• Multi stage builds - Single Dockerfile for dev/test and prod images.
• Testability - Separate test image for testing in a CI environment.

Getting started

1. Clone this repo
2. Run make build-dev followed by make start to build and run the application
3. Visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser

License

MIT