Book Image

Learning Docker - Second Edition

By : Vinod Singh, Pethuru Raj, Jeeva S. Chelladhurai
Book Image

Learning Docker - Second Edition

By: Vinod Singh, Pethuru Raj, Jeeva S. Chelladhurai

Overview of this book

Docker is an open source containerization engine that offers a simple and faster way for developing and running software. Docker containers wrap software in a complete filesystem that contains everything it needs to run, enabling any application to be run anywhere – this flexibily and portabily means that you can run apps in the cloud, on virtual machines, or on dedicated servers. This book will give you a tour of the new features of Docker and help you get started with Docker by building and deploying a simple application. It will walk you through the commands required to manage Docker images and containers. You’ll be shown how to download new images, run containers, list the containers running on the Docker host, and kill them. You’ll learn how to leverage Docker’s volumes feature to share data between the Docker host and its containers – this data management feature is also useful for persistent data. This book also covers how to orchestrate containers using Docker compose, debug containers, and secure containers using the AppArmor and SELinux security modules.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

A quick overview of the Dockerfile's syntax

In this section, we will explain the syntax or the format of Dockerfile. A Dockerfile is made up of instructions, comments, parser directives, and empty lines, as shown here:

# Comment 

INSTRUCTION arguments

The instruction line of Dockerfile is made up of two components, where the instruction line begins with the INSTRUCTION itself, which is followed by the arguments for the instruction. The INSTRUCTION can be written in any case, in other words, it is case-insensitive. However, the standard practice or the convention is to use uppercase in order to differentiate it from the arguments. Let's relook at the content of Dockerfile in our previous example:

FROM busybox:latest 
CMD echo Hello World!!

Here, FROM is an instruction that has taken busybox:latest as an argument and CMD is an instruction that has taken echo Hello World!! as an argument.

...