Docker Up!

Ship your Spring boot app in a docker container

As the Docker website says you can build and run your application anywhere. One of the best containers - Docker is versatile, easy to use and configure.

This post will manly concentrate on running a sample Java based web applicaiton inside a docker container. However, installation is not covered in detail in this post.

In order to run any application on a docker container there are 3 major steps: 1. Write a Dockerfile. 2. Build the Docker image. 3. Run the image.

We will look through each of these steps.

1. Writing a Dockerfile

This is the first and the most important step in setting up a container. The dockerfile contains everything that your app needs. It is analogous to a script that will achieve certain tasks. For our example below is the dockerfile.

$ cd your-app
$ create a file named Dockerfile

Inside the file paste the following lines.

From tomcat:8-jre8
ADD target/app.war /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/

This file is the simplest of dockerfiles one can imagine. It essentially does two things - Pull up an already existing image of tomcat8 from the Docker Hub and packaging your war file inside docker’s tomcat. Now let us segue into the next section.

2. Build the docker image

Just jump into the directory where the dockerfile sits and type the following command

$ sudo docker build -t image_name:tag_name

The -t flag is to attach a tag with this image. It can be the verison of the image.

This was pretty simple. Lets move on to the final step.

3. Run the image

$ sudo docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name your_app name_of_the_image:tag

Now lets break down this cryptic command.

The run command is the primary task that we are executing ie, running the image. -d means detached ie, it runs the container in the background. -p stands for port and it binds your computer port 8080 to docker’s 8080 port. –name tag is self explanatory and the tag is the name of the tag that we used while building our image.

Few handy docker commands