Being relatively new to Docker development, I've seen a few different ways that apps and dependencies are installed.
For example, in the official Wordpress image, the WP source is downloaded in the Dockerfile and extracted into /usr/src and then this is installed to /var/www/html in the entrypoint script.
Other images download and install the source in the Dockerfile, meaning the entrypoint just deals with config issues.
Either way the source scripts have to be updated if a new version of the source is available, so one way versus the other doesn't seem to make updating for a new version any more efficient.
What are the pros and cons of each approach? Is one recommended over the other for any specific sorts of setup?
Generally you should install application code and dependencies exclusively in the Dockerfile. The image entrypoint should never download or install anything.
This approach is simpler (you often don't need an ENTRYPOINT line at all) and more reproducible. You might run across some setups that run commands like npm install in their entrypoint script; this work will be repeated every time the container runs, and the container won't start up if the network is unreachable. Installing dependencies in the Dockerfile only happens once (and generally can be cached across image rebuilds) and makes the image self-contained.
The Docker Hub wordpress image is unusual in that the underlying Wordpress libraries, the custom PHP application, and the application data are all stored in the same directory tree, and it's typical to use a volume mount for that application tree. Its entrypoint script looks for a wp-includes/index.php file inside the application source tree, and if it's not there it copies it in. That's a particular complex entrypoint script.
A generally useful pattern is to keep an application's data somewhere separate from the application source tree. If you're installing a framework, install it as a library using the host application's ordinary dependency system (for example, list it in a Node package.json file rather than trying to include it in a base image). This is good practice in general; in Docker it specifically lets you mount a volume on the data directory and not disturb the application.
For a typical Node application, for example, you might install the application and its dependencies in a Dockerfile, and not have an ENTRYPOINT declared at all:
FROM node:14
WORKDIR /app
# Install the dependencies
COPY package.json yarn.lock ./
RUN yarn install
# Install everything else
COPY . ./
# Point at some other data directory
RUN mkdir /data
ENV DATA_DIR=/data
# Application code can look at process.env.DATA_DIR
# Usual application metadata
EXPOSE 3000
CMD yarn start
...and then run this with a volume mounted for the data directory, leaving the application code intact:
docker build -t my-image .
docker volume create my-data
docker run -p 3000:3000 -d -v my-data:/data my-image
Related
I have a few Dockerfiles right now.
One is for Cassandra 3.5, and it is FROM cassandra:3.5
I also have a Dockerfile for Kafka, but t is quite a bit more complex. It is FROM java:openjdk-8-fre and it runs a long command to install Kafka and Zookeeper.
Finally, I have an application written in Scala that uses SBT.
For that Dockerfile, it is FROM broadinstitute/scala-baseimage, which gets me Java 8, Scala 2.11.7, and STB 0.13.9, which are what I need.
Perhaps, I don't understand how Docker works, but my Scala program has Cassandra and Kafka as dependencies and for development purposes, I want others to be able to simply clone my repo with the Dockerfile and then be able to build it with Cassandra, Kafka, Scala, Java and SBT all baked in so that they can just compile the source. I'm having a lot of issues with this though.
How do I combine these Dockerfiles? How do I simply make an environment with those things baked in?
You can, with the multi-stage builds feature introduced in Docker 1.17
Take a look at this:
FROM golang:1.7.3
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=0 /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/app .
CMD ["./app"]
Then build the image normally:
docker build -t alexellis2/href-counter:latest
From : https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage-build/
The end result is the same tiny production image as before, with a significant reduction in complexity. You don’t need to create any intermediate images and you don’t need to extract any artifacts to your local system at all.
How does it work? The second FROM instruction starts a new build stage with the alpine:latest image as its base. The COPY --from=0 line copies just the built artifact from the previous stage into this new stage. The Go SDK and any intermediate artifacts are left behind, and not saved in the final image.
You can't combine dockerfiles as conflicts may occur. What you want to do is to create a new dockerfile or build a custom image.
TL;DR;
If your current development container contains all the tools you need and works, then save it as an image and upon it to a repo and create a dockerfile to pull from that image off that repo.
Details:
Building a custom image is by far easier than creating a dockerfile using a public image as you can store whatever hacks and mods into the image. To do so, start a blank container with a basic Linux image (or broadinstitute/scala-baseimage), install whatever tools you need and configure them until everything works correctly, then save it (the container) as an image. Create a new container off this image and test to see if you can build your code on top of it via docker-compose (or however you want to do/build it). If it works, than you have a working base image that you can upload to a repo so others can pull it.
To build a dockerfile with a public image, you will need to put all hacks, mods and setup on the dockerfile itself. That is, you will need to place every command line that you used into a text file and reduce whatever hacks, mods and setup into command lines. At the end, your dockerfile will create an image automatically and you don't need to store this image into a repo and all you need to do is to give others the dockerfile and they can spin the image up at their own docker.
Note that once you have a working dockerfile, you can tweak it easily as it will create a new image every time you use the dockerfile. With a custom image, you may run into issues where you need to rebuild the image due to conflicts. For example, all of your tools work with openjdk until you install one that doesn't work. The fix may involve uninstalling openjdk and use the oracle one, but all configuration you did for all the tools that you have installed broke.
The following answer applies to docker 1.7 and above:
I would prefer to use --from=NAME and from image as NAME
Why?
You can use --from=0 and above but this might get little hard to manage when you have many docker stages in dockerfile.
sample example:
FROM golang:1.7.3 as backend
WORKDIR /backend
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN #install some stuff, compile assets....
FROM golang:1.7.3 as assets
WORKDIR /assets
RUN ./getassets.sh
FROM nodejs:latest as frontend
RUN npm install
WORKDIR /assets
COPY --from=assets /asets .
CMD ["./app"]
FROM alpine:latest as mergedassets
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=frontend . /
COPY --from=backend ./backend .
CMD ["./app"]
Note: Managing dockerfile properly will help to build a docker image much faster. Internally docker usings docker layer caching to help with this process, incase the image have to be rebuilt.
Yes, you can roll a whole lot of software into a single Docker image (GitLab does this, with one image that includes Postgres and everything else), but generalhenry is right - that's not the typical way to use Docker.
As you say, Cassandra and Kafka are dependencies for your Scala app, they're not part of the app, so they don't all belong in the same image.
Having to orchestrate many containers with Docker Compose adds an extra admin layer, but it gives you much more flexibility:
your containers can have different lifespans, so when you have a new version of your app to deploy, you only need to run a new app container, you can leave the dependencies running;
you can use the same app image in any environment, using different configurations for your dependencies - e.g. in dev you can run a basic Kafka container and in prod have it clustered on many nodes, your app container is the same;
your dependencies can be used by other apps too - so multiple consumers can run in different containers and all work with the same Kafka and Cassandra containers;
plus all the scalability, logging etc. already mentioned.
When might you want to "combine" Docker images?
As others are pointing out here, you typically don't want to put your database and you application into the same Docker image. Ideally you want a Docker image to wrap a "single process"/"runtime". This allows each process to be scaled up/down and restarted individually.
Let's say you want to use some shared C-libraries/executables that are not available in the package manager of the image you are using, but someone else has created an image where they are precompiled - and you might not want to recompile these binaries as part of your build (depending on how long this takes). Is there a way to quickly create a POC-Docker image containing all of these executables/libraries based on the existing images?
Docker and Composition
Relevant discussion: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/3378
What Docker lacks is a good way of composing images. You can copy individual files or entire file systems from other images into your own using COPY --from=<image> <from-path> <to-path>. There is no builtin way of copying the environment variables from another image into your own.
That said, I have personally created a custom frontend/parser for Dockerfiles that adds an INCLUDE <image>-keyword. This copies the entire filesystem, along with the environment variables into your image:
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -t myimage .
#syntax=bergkvist/includeimage
FROM alpine:3.12.0
INCLUDE rust:1.44-alpine3.12
INCLUDE python:3.8.3-alpine3.12
nixpkgs.dockerTools
if you want truly composable Docker builds, I recommend checking out dockerTools in nixpkgs. This will also result in more reproducible (and typically very small) images. See https://nix.dev/tutorials/building-and-running-docker-images
docker load < $(nix-build docker-image.nix)
# docker-image.nix
let
pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
python = pkgs.python38;
rustc = pkgs.rustc;
in pkgs.dockerTools.buildImage {
name = "myimage";
tag = "latest";
contents = [ python rustc ];
}
Docker doesn't do merges of the images, but there isn't anything stopping you combining the dockerfiles if available, and rolling into them into a fat image which you'd need to build. There's times where this makes sense, however, as for running multiple processes in a container most Docker dogma will point to this as less desirable especially with microservice architecture (however rules are there to be broken right?)
You could not combine docker images into 1 container. See the detail discussions in Moby issue, How do I combine several images into one via Dockerfile.
For your case, it is better to not include the whole Cassandra and Kafka images. The application would only need the Cassandra Scala driver and Kafka Scala driver. The container should include the drivers only.
I needed docker:latest and python:latest images for Gitlab CI. Here is what I came up with:
FROM ubuntu:latest
RUN apt update
RUN apt install -y sudo
RUN sudo apt install -y docker.io
RUN sudo apt install -y python3-pip
RUN sudo apt install -y python3
RUN docker --version
RUN pip3 --version
RUN python3 --version
After I've build and pushed it to my Docker Hub repo:
docker build -t docker-hub-repo/image-name:latest path/to/Dockerfile
docker push docker-hub-repo/image-name:latest
Don't forget to docker login before push
Hope it helps
So, I'm trying to get into embedded rust, for which I had to use the nightly version of rust, and modify my .cargo/config.toml to change the target device, and stuff. I decided to use docker, as I didn't want this interfering with my main installation. I don't know much about docker, but I'm assuming, it's quite similar to pipenv, where what I do with the docker image, doesn't affect anything outside it. (Unless I run the code)
So, this is how my Dockerfile looks
FROM jdrouet/rust-nightly:buster-slim AS builder
WORKDIR /usr/source/myapp
COPY . .
RUN cargo build --release
CMD cargo run
When I run sudo docker build . -t name It gives me the error I used to get before modifying my .cargo/config.toml file, which is a good thing, I'm guessing, cuz now I can revert to my original configuration, and make the changes to this image's config files. But I'm not able to find the configuration files for this docker image. I don't know what WORKDIR does, but there is no folder called /source in my /usr directory
So, I'm trying to get into embedded rust, for which I had to use the nightly version of rust, and modify my .cargo/config.toml to change the target device, and stuff
You can put a file in the folder wherever/your/project/is/.cargo/config.toml, and it will only impact the project(s) in that directory.
source: Cargo Book
I don't know much about docker, but I'm assuming, it's quite similar to pipenv
Docker is actually quite different to Pipenv. Cargo is similar to Pipenv in that it manages your dependencies for you (Cargo.toml vs Pipfile), distinguishes between regular dependencies vs dev dependencies vs build-time dependencies, etc. Docker is a level of isolation beyond this -- a Docker container is a completely different filesystem from your actual computer. The Dockerfile is a recipe that tells Docker how to build an image of your container, which Docker can run.
Basically, WORKDIR /usr/source/myapp creates a folder /usr/source/app in the Docker container's file system, and cd's into that for the rest of the Dockerfile. This means that the following line, COPY . ., will copy everything in the same folder as the Dockerfile into the folder in the container /usr/source/app.
I bet if you open a shell into the Docker container like so:
# Build the docker container
docker build . -t my-cool-project:latest
# Run it
docker run -it my-cool-project:latest bash
you should be able to cd /usr/source/app and see all your stuff.
I have a few Dockerfiles right now.
One is for Cassandra 3.5, and it is FROM cassandra:3.5
I also have a Dockerfile for Kafka, but t is quite a bit more complex. It is FROM java:openjdk-8-fre and it runs a long command to install Kafka and Zookeeper.
Finally, I have an application written in Scala that uses SBT.
For that Dockerfile, it is FROM broadinstitute/scala-baseimage, which gets me Java 8, Scala 2.11.7, and STB 0.13.9, which are what I need.
Perhaps, I don't understand how Docker works, but my Scala program has Cassandra and Kafka as dependencies and for development purposes, I want others to be able to simply clone my repo with the Dockerfile and then be able to build it with Cassandra, Kafka, Scala, Java and SBT all baked in so that they can just compile the source. I'm having a lot of issues with this though.
How do I combine these Dockerfiles? How do I simply make an environment with those things baked in?
You can, with the multi-stage builds feature introduced in Docker 1.17
Take a look at this:
FROM golang:1.7.3
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=0 /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/app .
CMD ["./app"]
Then build the image normally:
docker build -t alexellis2/href-counter:latest
From : https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage-build/
The end result is the same tiny production image as before, with a significant reduction in complexity. You don’t need to create any intermediate images and you don’t need to extract any artifacts to your local system at all.
How does it work? The second FROM instruction starts a new build stage with the alpine:latest image as its base. The COPY --from=0 line copies just the built artifact from the previous stage into this new stage. The Go SDK and any intermediate artifacts are left behind, and not saved in the final image.
You can't combine dockerfiles as conflicts may occur. What you want to do is to create a new dockerfile or build a custom image.
TL;DR;
If your current development container contains all the tools you need and works, then save it as an image and upon it to a repo and create a dockerfile to pull from that image off that repo.
Details:
Building a custom image is by far easier than creating a dockerfile using a public image as you can store whatever hacks and mods into the image. To do so, start a blank container with a basic Linux image (or broadinstitute/scala-baseimage), install whatever tools you need and configure them until everything works correctly, then save it (the container) as an image. Create a new container off this image and test to see if you can build your code on top of it via docker-compose (or however you want to do/build it). If it works, than you have a working base image that you can upload to a repo so others can pull it.
To build a dockerfile with a public image, you will need to put all hacks, mods and setup on the dockerfile itself. That is, you will need to place every command line that you used into a text file and reduce whatever hacks, mods and setup into command lines. At the end, your dockerfile will create an image automatically and you don't need to store this image into a repo and all you need to do is to give others the dockerfile and they can spin the image up at their own docker.
Note that once you have a working dockerfile, you can tweak it easily as it will create a new image every time you use the dockerfile. With a custom image, you may run into issues where you need to rebuild the image due to conflicts. For example, all of your tools work with openjdk until you install one that doesn't work. The fix may involve uninstalling openjdk and use the oracle one, but all configuration you did for all the tools that you have installed broke.
The following answer applies to docker 1.7 and above:
I would prefer to use --from=NAME and from image as NAME
Why?
You can use --from=0 and above but this might get little hard to manage when you have many docker stages in dockerfile.
sample example:
FROM golang:1.7.3 as backend
WORKDIR /backend
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN #install some stuff, compile assets....
FROM golang:1.7.3 as assets
WORKDIR /assets
RUN ./getassets.sh
FROM nodejs:latest as frontend
RUN npm install
WORKDIR /assets
COPY --from=assets /asets .
CMD ["./app"]
FROM alpine:latest as mergedassets
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=frontend . /
COPY --from=backend ./backend .
CMD ["./app"]
Note: Managing dockerfile properly will help to build a docker image much faster. Internally docker usings docker layer caching to help with this process, incase the image have to be rebuilt.
Yes, you can roll a whole lot of software into a single Docker image (GitLab does this, with one image that includes Postgres and everything else), but generalhenry is right - that's not the typical way to use Docker.
As you say, Cassandra and Kafka are dependencies for your Scala app, they're not part of the app, so they don't all belong in the same image.
Having to orchestrate many containers with Docker Compose adds an extra admin layer, but it gives you much more flexibility:
your containers can have different lifespans, so when you have a new version of your app to deploy, you only need to run a new app container, you can leave the dependencies running;
you can use the same app image in any environment, using different configurations for your dependencies - e.g. in dev you can run a basic Kafka container and in prod have it clustered on many nodes, your app container is the same;
your dependencies can be used by other apps too - so multiple consumers can run in different containers and all work with the same Kafka and Cassandra containers;
plus all the scalability, logging etc. already mentioned.
When might you want to "combine" Docker images?
As others are pointing out here, you typically don't want to put your database and you application into the same Docker image. Ideally you want a Docker image to wrap a "single process"/"runtime". This allows each process to be scaled up/down and restarted individually.
Let's say you want to use some shared C-libraries/executables that are not available in the package manager of the image you are using, but someone else has created an image where they are precompiled - and you might not want to recompile these binaries as part of your build (depending on how long this takes). Is there a way to quickly create a POC-Docker image containing all of these executables/libraries based on the existing images?
Docker and Composition
Relevant discussion: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/3378
What Docker lacks is a good way of composing images. You can copy individual files or entire file systems from other images into your own using COPY --from=<image> <from-path> <to-path>. There is no builtin way of copying the environment variables from another image into your own.
That said, I have personally created a custom frontend/parser for Dockerfiles that adds an INCLUDE <image>-keyword. This copies the entire filesystem, along with the environment variables into your image:
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -t myimage .
#syntax=bergkvist/includeimage
FROM alpine:3.12.0
INCLUDE rust:1.44-alpine3.12
INCLUDE python:3.8.3-alpine3.12
nixpkgs.dockerTools
if you want truly composable Docker builds, I recommend checking out dockerTools in nixpkgs. This will also result in more reproducible (and typically very small) images. See https://nix.dev/tutorials/building-and-running-docker-images
docker load < $(nix-build docker-image.nix)
# docker-image.nix
let
pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
python = pkgs.python38;
rustc = pkgs.rustc;
in pkgs.dockerTools.buildImage {
name = "myimage";
tag = "latest";
contents = [ python rustc ];
}
Docker doesn't do merges of the images, but there isn't anything stopping you combining the dockerfiles if available, and rolling into them into a fat image which you'd need to build. There's times where this makes sense, however, as for running multiple processes in a container most Docker dogma will point to this as less desirable especially with microservice architecture (however rules are there to be broken right?)
You could not combine docker images into 1 container. See the detail discussions in Moby issue, How do I combine several images into one via Dockerfile.
For your case, it is better to not include the whole Cassandra and Kafka images. The application would only need the Cassandra Scala driver and Kafka Scala driver. The container should include the drivers only.
I needed docker:latest and python:latest images for Gitlab CI. Here is what I came up with:
FROM ubuntu:latest
RUN apt update
RUN apt install -y sudo
RUN sudo apt install -y docker.io
RUN sudo apt install -y python3-pip
RUN sudo apt install -y python3
RUN docker --version
RUN pip3 --version
RUN python3 --version
After I've build and pushed it to my Docker Hub repo:
docker build -t docker-hub-repo/image-name:latest path/to/Dockerfile
docker push docker-hub-repo/image-name:latest
Don't forget to docker login before push
Hope it helps
Let's say I want to run inside a docker container some third party .net core application I don't fully trust.
To simplify, let's assume that application is the simple Hello World console app generated by dotnet new. This is just the 2 files Program.cs and project.json.
Right now I have tried the following approach:
Copy that application into some folder of my host
Create a new container using the microsoft/dotnet image, mounting that folder as a volume, running a specific command for building and running the app:
$ docker run --rm -it --name dotnet \
-v /some/temp/folder/app:/app \
microsoft/dotnet:latest \
/bin/sh -c 'cd /app && dotnet restore && dotnet run'
I was also considering the idea of having a predefined dockerfile with microsoft/dotnet as the base image. It will basically embed the application code, set it as the working dir and run the restore, build and run commands.
FROM microsoft/dotnet:latest
COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
RUN ["dotnet", "restore"]
RUN ["dotnet", "build"]
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "run"]
I could then copy the predefined dockerfile into the temp folder, build a new image just for that particular application and finally run a new container using that image.
Is the dockerfile approach overkill for simple command line apps? What would be the best practice for running those untrusted applications? (which might be one I completely ignore)
EDIT
Since I will discard the container after it runs and the docker command will be generated by some application, I will probably stay with the first option of just mounting a volume.
I have also found this blog post where they built a similar sanbox environment and ended up following the same mounted volume approach
As far I know, what happens in docker, stays in docker.
When you link a volume (-v) to the image, the process can alter the files in the folder you mounted. But only there. The process cannot follow any symlinks or step out of the mounted folder since it's forbidden for obvious security reasons.
When you don't link anything and copy the application code into the image, it's definitely isolated.
The tcp/udp ports exposition is up to you as well as memory/cpu consumption and you can even isolate the process from internet e.g. like that
Therefore, I don't think that using dockerfile is an overkill and I'd summarize it like this:
When you want to run it once, try it and forget it - use command line if you are ok with typing the nasty command. If you plan to use it more - create a Dockerfile. I don't see much space for declaring "best practice" here, considering it an question of personal preferences.
I am using windows and have boot2docker installed. I've downloaded images from docker hub and run basic commands. BUT
How do I take an existing application sitting on my local machine (lets just say it has one file index.php, for simplicity). How do I take that and put it into a docker image and run it?
Imagine you have the following existing python2 application "hello.py" with the following content:
print "hello"
You have to do the following things to dockerize this application:
Create a folder where you'd like to store your Dockerfile in.
Create a file named "Dockerfile"
The Dockerfile consists of several parts which you have to define as described below:
Like a VM, an image has an operating system. In this example, I use ubuntu 16.04. Thus, the first part of the Dockerfile is:
FROM ubuntu:16.04
Imagine you have a fresh Ubuntu - VM, now you have to install some things to get your application working, right? This is done by the next part of the Dockerfile:
RUN apt-get update && \
apt-get upgrade -y && \
apt-get install -y python
For Docker, you have to create a working directory now in the image. The commands that you want to execute later on to start your application will search for files (like in our case the python file) in this directory. Thus, the next part of the Dockerfile creates a directory and defines this as the working directory:
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
As a next step, you copy the content of the folder where the Dockerfile is stored in to the image. In our example, the hello.py file is copied to the directory we created in the step above.
COPY . /usr/src/app
Finally, the following line executes the command "python hello.py" in your image:
CMD [ "python", "hello.py" ]
The complete Dockerfile looks like this:
FROM ubuntu:16.04
RUN apt-get update && \
apt-get upgrade -y && \
apt-get install -y python
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY . /usr/src/app
CMD [ "python", "hello.py" ]
Save the file and build the image by typing in the terminal:
$ docker build -t hello .
This will take some time. Afterwards, check if the image "hello" how we called it in the last line has been built successfully:
$ docker images
Run the image:
docker run hello
The output shout be "hello" in the terminal.
This is a first start. When you use Docker for web applications, you have to configure ports etc.
Your index.php is not really an application. The application is your Apache or nginx or even PHP's own server.
Because Docker uses features not available in the Windows core, you are running it inside an actual virtual machine. The only purpose for that would be training or preparing images for your real server environment.
There are two main concepts you need to understand for Docker: Images and Containers.
An image is a template composed of layers. Each layer contains only the differences between the previous layer and some offline system information. Each layer is fact an image. You should always make your image from an existing base, using the FROM directive in the Dockerfile (Reference docs at time of edit. Jan Vladimir Mostert's link is now a 404).
A container is an instance of an image, that has run or is currently running. When creating a container (a.k.a. running an image), you can map an internal directory from it to the outside. If there are files in both locations, the external directory override the one inside the image, but those files are not lost. To recover them you can commit a container to an image (preferably after stopping it), then launch a new container from the new image, without mapping that directory.
You'll need to build a docker image first, using a dockerFile, you'd probably setup apache on it, tell the dockerFile to copy your index.php file into your apache and expose a port.
See http://docs.docker.com/reference/builder/
See my other question for an example of a docker file:
Switching users inside Docker image to a non-root user (this is for copying over a .war file into tomcat, similar to copying a .php file into apache)
First off, you need to choose a platform to run your application (for instance, Ubuntu). Then install all the system tools/libraries necessary to run your application. This can be achieved by Dockerfile. Then, push Dockerfile and app to git or Bitbucket. Later, you can auto-build in the docker hub from github or Bitbucket. The later part of this tutorial here has more on that. If you know the basics just fast forward it to 50:00.