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

Painfully learned container lessons

As you start building your own containers, you can avoid many problems by keeping in mind the best practices discussed in Docker’s official documentation here: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/09_image_best/.

That said, we’ve compiled a small list of the most egregious containerization mistakes we’ve noticed, and how to avoid them. This section is the result of many sleepless nights, outages, and learning things the hard way.

Image size

Start with minimal images, like Scratch or Alpine. To deploy most applications, it’s a good idea to try to stay away from big images and distributions like Ubuntu. When build dependencies are required, removing these, or using intermediate build containers when building larger/multi-container projects, is recommended.

Small, minimal images don’t just mean faster download speeds and less resource usage, but also make it a lot easier for you to manage. If an image...