Node.js Development Made Easy With Docker 🐳

Introduction

In previous article, we learned:

• Basics of Docker
• Docker Images
• Docker Containers
• Building Node.js Image and Running it in Container

It looked good (for basics) to have a separate environment for our node.js application but you will have to build an image and run it again after every little change you make.

What if you want to sync your development environment such that as soon as you make a change in your code, it is automatically reflected after you hit your API again? Sounds cool for the development environment, right? 🤩

Enter Bind Mounts

Official docs says, When you use a bind mount, a file or directory on the host machine is mounted into a container. The file or directory is referenced by its absolute path on the host machine. Read official details here.

In simpler terms, it synchronizes the application directory with the directory inside the container so that whatever change you make in your host machine is immediately reflected in your container.

This means if you change anything in your files, they will automatically be changed in the running container.

Nodemon and package.json

Since you are from node.js world, you would know that we have to use nodemon which monitors our files in the root directory and then restart node.js app as soon as file change is detected.

I had nodemon globally installed so I faced issue with the docker container, so please make sure that you have nodemon in your node_modules by running this command:

npm install --save-dev nodemon

You will have it in devDependencies. Now you should edit scripts as follows in package.json:

"scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js",
    "dev": "nodemon -L index.js",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },

Finally, your package.json should look like this:

{
  "name": "docker",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js",
    "dev": "nodemon -L index.js",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.18.2"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "nodemon": "^3.0.1"
  }
}

We are now done with package.json changes. Lets move towards updating Dockerfile

Updating Dockerfile

Before we had this from previous article,:

FROM node:12.18.3-alpine3.12
WORKDIR /app
COPY package.json /app
RUN npm install
COPY . /app
EXPOSE 3000:3000
CMD ["node", "index.js"]

Now since we have updated package.json and since we want to run it in development environment so we have to run this command:

npm run dev

In order for this to be in Dockerfile, we have to replace last line like this:

CMD ["npm", "run", "dev"]

Overall Dockerfile should look like this:

FROM node:12.18.3-alpine3.12
WORKDIR /app
COPY package.json /app
RUN npm install
COPY . /app
ENV PORT 3000
EXPOSE $PORT
EXPOSE 3000:3000
CMD ["npm", "run", "dev"]

We have also made these two changes:

ENV PORT 3000
EXPOSE $PORT

We are now adding environment variable of 3000 directly in our Dockerfile and exposing it.

Building Docker Image

Since now we have a change in package.json so we have to re-build our image from the command we learned earlier:

docker build -t shameel-node-image .

Running Docker Container

From previous article, we had learned this docker command:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -d --name shameel-node-app -d shameel-node-image

This runs docker container named as shameel-node-app from shameel-node-image in detached mode and exposes internal port of container i.e, 3000 to the hostMachine port of 3000.

Now, you will need to use a new flag -v:

docker run -v <hostMachinePath>:<containerPath> -p 3000:3000 -d --name shameel-node-app -d shameel-node-image

You can give it like this if you are on windows:

docker run -v "D:\shameel-node-docker":/app -p 3000:3000 --name shameel-node-app shameel-node-image

You have to give absolute path of hostMachine. In this case, D:\shameel-node-docker is the absolute path where my application exists in my windows machine.

But that makes our command too long. We need a solution which should be able to give us absolute path in a cleaner way.

In Windows CMD, you can get it using %cd% and in Linux Bash you should be able to get it with $(pwd)

For Bash

I tried it using Git Bash, I hope it should work in Bash in Linux as well.

$ docker run -v "$(pwd):/app" -p 3000:3000 -d --name shameel-node-app shameel-node-image

I got this output which means container started running:

For Windows CMD

I ran this command it worked like a charm in CMD:

docker run -v "%cd%:/app" -d -p 3000:3000 --name shameel-node-app shameel-node-image

Inspecting the Mount

You now have successfully mounted the location from your host machine to the container and would like to verify it.

To do that, the syntax of command is this:

docker inspect <conainer-name>

For my case, it becomes this:

docker inspect shameel-node-app

And then look for Mounts from the entire output.

If you do not want to inspect everything and only focus on Mount then run the command below:

docker inspect -f "{{ .Mounts }}" shameel-node-app

You should be able to see the bind path of your host machine to the container.

If you have Docker Desktop, you can select your container and click on Bind mounts to check this out:

Avoid node_modules synchronization

Currently, if you delete node_modules from your host machine. It will also be deleted from container.
This should not be a wanted behavior because we are already installing node_modules in our Dockerfile. So, we have to come up with a way where we synchronize everything other than node_modules

We will have to utilize -v flag with more specific path.

I ran a command in CMD like this:

docker run -v "%cd%:/app" -v /app/node_modules -d -p 3000:3000 --name shameel-node-app shameel-node-image

Now from Docker Desktop, you can verify it as well:

Everything other than node_modules is MOUNT.

node_modules are now installed from npm install command in our Dockerfile and are no longer synced to the host machine.

Verifying Development Environment

Currently we have this app:

After making slight changes and saving it in the file as:

app.get('/', (_, res) => {
    res.send('Hello Shameel! How are you?');
    }
);

You can check in below image that the nodemon restarted in Docker Desktop logs and as soon as we refresh the page, we should be able to see the reflected changes

You can check the logs in CLI from this command as well:

docker logs <container>

For me, it is:

docker logs shameel-node-app

Why You Should Do Read Only Bind Mount

Currently, the mounting is dual-side. If you make any changes in app directory in container, it will be reflected in your host machine.

It is dangerous because if somehow, someone got access to your container then the hacker can easily put something malicious in your main machine.

The only change in the command is addition of :ro which ensures that the mount is READ ONLY.

Command in bash would look like this:

docker run -v "$(pwd):/app:ro" -p 3000:3000 -d --name shameel-node-app shameel-node-image

Command in CMD would look like this:

docker run -v "%cd%:/app:ro" -p 3000:3000 -d --name shameel-node-app shameel-node-image

Conclusion

In this blog, we learned how to make development in node.js easy with the help of docker by incorporating bind mounts and ensuring that our dev changes are reflected as soon as we save our file.

Happy coding and containerizing! 🐳✨

Follow me for more such content:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shameeluddin/
Github: https://github.com/Shameel123