Running Simple Node.js Application

Running a Basic Node.js application inside a Container

The example I’m going to discuss assumes you have a Docker installation that works in your system and a basic understanding of how to work with Node.js . If you are aware of how you must work with Docker , it should be evident that Node.js framework need not be installed on your system, rather we would be using the latest version of the node image available from Docker. Hence if needed you may download the image beforehand with the command docker pull node. (The command automatically pulls the latest version of the node image from docker.)

Proceed to make a directory where all your working application files would reside. Create a package.json file in this directory that describes your application as well as the dependencies. Your package.json file should look something like this:

 {
   "name": "docker_web_app",
   "version": "1.0.0",
   "description": "Node.js on Docker",
   "author": "First Last <first.last@example.com>",
   "main": "server.js",
   "scripts": {
     "start": "node server.js"
   },
   "dependencies": {
     "express": "^4.13.3"
   }
 }

If we need to work with Node.js we usually create a server file that defines a web application. In this case we use the Express.js framework (version 4.13.3 onwards). A basic server.js file would look something like this:

 var express = require('express');
 var PORT = 8080;
 var app = express();
 app.get('/', function (req, res) {
   res.send('Hello world\n');
 });
 
 app.listen(PORT);
 console.log('Running on https://localhost:' + PORT);

For those familiar with Docker, you would have come across a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile is a text file that contains all the commands required to build a custom image that is tailored for your application.

Create an empty text file named Dockerfile in the current directory. The method to create one is straightforward in Windows. In Linux, you may want to execute touch Dockerfile in the directory containing all the files required for your application. Open the Dockerfile with any text editor and add the following lines:

FROM node:latest
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/my_first_app
WORKDIR /usr/src/my_first_app
COPY package.json /usr/src/my_first_app/
RUN npm install
COPY . /usr/src/my_first_app
EXPOSE 8080

FROM node:latest instructs the Docker daemon what image we want to build from. In this case we use the latest version of the official Docker image node available from the Docker Hub.
Inside this image we proceed to create a working directory that contains all the required files and we instruct the daemon to set this directory as the desired working directory for our application. For this we add
```
  RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/my_first_app
  WORKDIR /usr/src/my_first_app
```
We then proceed to install application dependencies by first moving the package.json file (which specifies app info including dependencies) to the /usr/src/my_first_app working directory in the image. We do this by
```
  COPY package.json /usr/src/my_first_app/
  RUN npm install 
  
```
We then type COPY . /usr/src/my_first_app to add all the application files and source code to the working directory in the image.
We then use the EXPOSE directive to instruct the daemon to make port 8080 of the resulting container visible (via a container-to-host mapping) since the application binds to port 8080.
In the last step, we instruct the daemon to run the command node server.js inside the image by executing the basic npm start command. We use the CMD directive for this, which takes the commands as arguments.
```
  CMD [ "npm", "start" ] 
```

We then create a .dockerignore file in the same directory as the Dockerfile

to prevent our copy of node_modules and logs used by our Node.js system installation from being copied on to the Docker image. The .dockerignore file must have the following content:

    node_modules
    npm-debug.log

Build your image

Navigate to the directory that contains the Dockerfile and run the following command to build the Docker image. The -t flag lets you tag your image so it’s easier to find later using the docker images command:

    $ docker build -t <your username>/node-web-app .

Your image will now be listed by Docker. View images using the below command:

$ docker images

REPOSITORY                      TAG        ID              CREATED
node                            latest     539c0211cd76    10 minutes ago
<your username>/node-web-app    latest     d64d3505b0d2    1 minute ago

Running the image

We can now run the image we just created using the application contents, the node base image and the Dockerfile. We now proceed to run our newly created <your username>/node-web-app image. Providing -d switch to the docker run command runs the container in detached mode,so that the container runs in the background. The -p flag redirects a public port to a private port inside the container. Run the image you previously built using this command:

$ docker run -p 49160:8080 -d <your username>/node-web-app

Print the output of your app by running docker ps on your terminal. The output should look something like this.

 CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                         COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                     NAMES
 7b701693b294      <your username>/node-web-app   "npm start"         20 minutes ago       Up 48 seconds       0.0.0.0:49160->8080/tcp   loving_goldstine

Get application output by entering docker logs <CONTAINER ID>. In this case it is docker logs 7b701693b294.

Output: Running on https://localhost:8080

From the docker ps output, the port mapping obtained is 0.0.0.0:49160->8080/tcp. Hence Docker mapped the 8080 port inside of the container to the port 49160 on the host machine. In the browser we can now enter localhost:49160.

We can also call our app using curl:

$ curl -i localhost:49160

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Express
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 12
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2017 14:00:12 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

Hello world

Running a Basic Node.js application inside a Container

Build your image

Running the image