This article is great! Thanks for sharing the experience. To the dependencies installation issue I tried to use the below config in my docker-compose file:

volumes:      
  - ${PROJECT_HOME}:/src      
  - project-local_node_modules:/src/node_modules

The source code directory will be bind mounted to the container and the node_modules directory will be overridden with a shared volume, thus it gets preserved after docker-compose down.