Docker is a great tool for running your applications both locally and remote environments, including Production. This tutorial will show you how you can use Docker for your projects.

To get started, you will want to make sure you have Docker Desktop installed on your local machine. To download it if you are on a Mac or Windows machine, click here and follow the prompts to install Docker. This will automatically install the docker and docker-compose commands for you, which are helpful for spinning up Docker containers.

Once you have downloaded Docker Desktop, if you are on a Mac, you should see a Docker icon (a whale with boxes on top of it) on the top menu bar. If you are using Windows, it should be on the bottom right. If you see the Docker icon with nothing changing in the icon (you’ll see what I mean as Docker is starting up), that means you are good to go.

Once you see the icon, open up your terminal and run the commands docker -v and docker-compose -v. If the installation was successful, you should see versions for each command.

Now that we have the docker commands working, let’s navigate to a directory and create a sample project. In this example, we will create a docker-compose.yml file to spin up a Jekyll server on port 4000. In the directory you want to add this project, enter the following commands:

# Create the directory to host our project.
mkdir docker-example-jekyll

# Navigate to our new directory to host the project.
cd docker-example-jekyll

# Create the docker-compose.yml file.
touch docker-compose.yml

Open up the docker-compose.yml file and paste in the following code and save:

version: '2'

services:
  jekyll:
    image: jekyll/jekyll:latest
    command: jekyll serve --watch --force_polling --verbose
    ports:
      - 4000:4000
    volumes:
      - .:/srv/jekyll

Now that you have content in the docker-compose.yml file, it’s time to attempt to spin up the containers listed in that file. To do this, run the command docker-compose up.

The Docker containers should be running now. To verify this, open a new tab in your terminal and enter docker ps. This will show all of your running Docker containers. Assuming your container is running, you will see at least one container running.

Now point your browser to http://localhost:4000 and if everything is working properly, you should see a brand new Jekyll site, which is running on the Docker container you just spun up.

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