Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Containerizing Applications with Docker

Over the last decade, Docker containerization has become a kind of default packaging format for web applications and modern microservices. In a container, your program sits in a very lightweight, isolated shell of Linux filesystem, process, user, and network abstractions, safely separate from the host environment. Container images also happen to be incredibly portable – they’re easy to shuffle around from a developer’s laptop to a testing or staging environment to a production server. This solves many of the problems that have plagued software and infrastructure over the last several decades.

In some sense, containers are quite similar to the Linux packages you’ve learned how to install from repositories. A container image is, roughly, a compressed archive (such as, a .tar.gz file) of your application, along with all the configuration files and dependencies the application needs. That little package – an...