Last week I went to my very first coding meetup with the Tampa Ruby Brigade. The topic of discussion was Docker for Ruby and Rails development. I have not reached the Rails portion of my lessons yet, but just wanted to attend to meet other people with the same interests and just to learn something new. You could say I was a little lost.
The meetups are monthly, locations and topics vary. This meeting was at the Suncoast Developers Guild, which is a local coding school and community representing a number of developer organizations in the Greater Tampa Bay area. The guest speaker was Tyler Johnston, Director of Engineering at Spatial Networks, who gave a talk on Docker - a platform he uses daily at his company.
WHAT IS DOCKER?
Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy and run applications through containers. The developer can package applications with their libraries and dependencies, in a sharable format. To create a Docker Image, you must create a Dockerfile that defines how to build the image. The Dockerfile acts as a recipe for the image. Once an image is created, you can make as many containers as you would like. To stay organized, you may want different containers for different parts of your application.
The application can run on any Linux, MacOS or Windows machine. Developers can write code and not have to worry about the system that it will be running on.
Docker Hub is a hosted repository for Docker Images. Once an image is built, it can be published to Docker Hub for others to use. Anyone is able to contribute to your application and/or modify it for their own needs. You may download a container that has already been published by the community such as Node.js, MYSQL or Ubuntu. There are many publicly available images and you can also host your own private images.
NEXT MEETUP
Although mostly lost during the lecture, I do know a little bit of something that I didn’t know before that can be helpful in the future.
The next Tampa Ruby Brigade meetup is February 21 and will be about ActionMailbox.