Category Archives: Docker

Photo of shipping containers

Video I Found Useful: “Getting Started with Docker”

As I’ve been exploring more about Docker and containers over the past month or two, I’ve been watching MANY videos on YouTube. One of the “intro to Docker” ones that I quite liked was this one from Brad Traversy:

What I found useful was how he used the very practical example of setting up a small website using nginx. Very good use case, including the use of volumes to have content that can be re-used between containers. He also discusses how to use DockerHub to make your container image available to other systems.

His subsequent video about using Docker Compose was also useful.


Image by frank mckenna (@frankiefoto) on Unsplash

local installation of WordPress

New Github repo for using WordPress with Docker

As I wrote over on my Disruptive Conversations site, I’ve been playing around with using Docker as a way to easily test new WordPress versions and plugins.  As part of that testing, I was trying to use the official WordPress image found on Dockerhub.

However, I was struggling with getting started, because the WordPress container is just… WordPress. It also needs a database to work, and my Docker experience was not yet strong enough to sort out how to link various containers together. So I raised an issue on Github asking about a step-by-step tutorial.

Github user wglambert very kindly provided a simple docker-compose.yaml file that could launch both WordPress and MySQL in separate containers and set up the necessary network and links.

It works wonderfully! And it has now been added to the instructions on DockerHub. (Thank you to the DockerHub admins for merging it in.)

Because I want to easily use the file on different systems, I put it up in a Github repo:

https://github.com/danyork/wordpress-basic-docker

Any of you are welcome to use it, too!

As I noted in my Disruptive Conversations article, I’m planning to start writing here a good bit more about using Docker. I’m rather impressed by all that can be done – and want to capture my own experiments here for my own future knowledge… and if it helps any of you all out, too, all the better!

Do you use Docker Swarm? If so, how?

Docker swarm page

UPDATE – 20 Nov 2018 – I wrote this back in 2016 as I was just experimenting with Docker. Since that time, not only did Swarm emerge as Docker’s tool for container management/orchestration/clustering, but we also saw the emergence and then domination of Kubernetes as a tool for container orchestration.  I’m leaving this post online, but at this point the examples are quite prominent for how Swarm and other tools can be used.

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Do you use Docker Swarm? If so, how?  I have been incredibly intrigued ever since reading about the release of Docker 1.12 earlier this week.

As Benjamin Wooten writes, now with only two commands:

  • We get a deployment platform which gives us resilience, robustness, failover and fault tolerance for our containers.
  • We get load balancing and a routing mesh which makes service discovery simple.
  • We can use our server resources more efficiently with various allocation strategies.
  • We can scale containers up and down with one command.
  • Communications within the cluster are secured with dynamically rotating certificates.

Ever since, I have been reading more, such as this piece about setting up a swarm with Raspberry Pi systems.

Now I am curious… how are any of you reading this using Docker Swarm? What are doing with it?  I am intrigued and curious to do more…