Be a better front-end developer: use Docker 🐳

2 min readOct 15, 2018

Hey Alice, are you:

tired of having to install NodeJS on your PC?
tired of your backend friends saying “Docker it’s cool”, but you are just a fucking frontend dev?
tired of dealing with dependency conflicts?
tired of being tired?

Docker is the solution, trust me!

But let’s be clear: I’m not here to show you how docker works.

The whole point here is:

You don’t need NodeJS on your pc to compile assets, you can use Docker

So, if you are a fronted dev tired of all of the JS nonsense, follow me in the rabbit hole.

One command to rule them all

If you just need to execute NodeJS in a heartbit (pun intended), here is the magic formula to write in the command line

$ docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app -w /app node:latest npm install

And with few changes, you can easily:

execute a Specific NodeJS version (eg. 9.11) edit the command with:node:9.11.
execute multiple commands in NodeJS simply using /bin/bash -c.
run a specific environment (prod | dev) adding-e "NODE_ENV=production"

$ docker run --rm -e "NODE_ENV=production" -v $(pwd):/app -w /app node:9.11 /bin/bash -c "npm install && npm start"

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

This method is amazing if you just need to run some quick and dirty test and be ready to go in few minutes.

What if you need to create something reusable and with some kind of persistency?

Docker Compose will help you on this task:

Docker Compose is the tool to define and run multiple Docker container.

Yeah, I know.. you don’t give a fuck about definitions. You are just a fucking frontend developer 🙌

Let me keep diving you into the rabbit hole, Alice.

Here you can see how I’ve added a docker-compose.yml file in my folder structure

Folder structureapp
├─ ...
├─ docker-compose.yml
└─ package.json

And this is the docker-compose.yml content

docker-compose.yml

As you see, I’ve specified the specs I need in the .yml file instead of writing them in the command line. Now simply run

$  docker-compose run node npm install

to execute your Docker container.

Yes, Alice.

I’ve just Dockerized your fuckin ass, frontend dev!