Introduction

Today I want to share how I approach building a Docker container. When I started building containers I found it difficult to take my newly built container image and deploy it to production without rebuilding it every time. The disconnect between development and production has turned many people away from utilizing Docker, and I hope today’s post can help clear up how to build a container image that is ready for deployment on production. With this approach I have been able to take existing applications and drop them into containers in a few minutes as opposed to days waiting on docker build. I have refined and iterated on this approach by building various types of containers with different uses: MySQL Schema Prototyper, Redis Clusters with HAProxy,RabbitMQ, Rails with Travis, Spring XD, Qt IDE using X11, and most of them are on my Docker Hub too.

I have been searching for a good way to describe this pattern for building containers, and so far the only name I have settled on is “Compose Configuration“. So here’s how it works: