Docker Desktop’s single sign-on (SSO) and sign-in enforcement (also called login enforcement) features work together to enhance security and ease of use. SSO allows users to log in with corporate credentials, whereas login enforcement ensures every user is authenticated, giving IT tighter control over compliance. In this post, we’ll define each of these features, explain their unique benefits, and show how using them together streamlines management and improves your Docker Desktop experience.

Before diving into the benefits of login alongside SSO, let’s clarify three related terms: login, single sign-on (SSO), and enforced login.

• Login: Logging in connects users to Docker’s suite of tools, enabling access to personalized settings, team resources, and features like Docker Scout and Docker Build Cloud. By default, members of an organization can use Docker Desktop without signing in. Logging in can be done through SSO or by using Docker-specific credentials.
• Single sign-on (SSO): SSO allows users to access Docker using their organization’s central authentication system, letting teams streamline access across multiple platforms with one set of credentials. SSO standardizes and secures login and supports automation around provisioning but does not automatically log in users unless enforced.
• Enforced login: This policy, configured by administrators, ensures users are logged in by requiring login credentials before accessing Docker Desktop and associated tools. With enforced login, teams gain consistent access to Docker’s productivity and security features, minimizing gaps in visibility and control.

With these definitions in mind, here’s why being logged in matters, how SSO simplifies login, and how login enforcement ensures your team gets the full benefit of Docker’s powerful development tools.

Why logging in matters for admins and compliance teams

Enforcing sign-in with corporate credentials ensures that all users accessing Docker Desktop are verified and utilizing the benefits of your Docker Business subscription while adding a layer of security to safeguard your software supply chain. This policy strengthens your organization’s security posture and enables Docker to provide detailed usage insights, helping compliance teams track engagement and adoption. 

Enforced login will support cloud-based control over settings, allowing admins to manage application configurations across the organization more effectively. By requiring login, your organization benefits from greater transparency, control, and alignment with compliance standards. 

When everyone in your organization signs in with proper credentials:

• Access controls for shared resources become more reliable, allowing administrators to enforce policies and permissions consistently.
• Developers stay connected to their workspaces and resources, minimizing disruptions.
• Desktop Insights Dashboard provides admins actionable insights into usage, from feature adoption to image usage trends and login activity, helping administrators optimize team performance and security.
• Teams gain full visibility and access to Docker Scout’s security insights, which only function with logged-in accounts.

Read more about the benefits of login on our blog post, Maximizing Docker Desktop: How Signing In Unlocks Advanced Features.

Options for enforcing sign-in

Docker provides three options to help administrators enforce sign-in. 

• Registry key method (Windows Only): Integrates seamlessly with Windows, letting IT enforce login policies within familiar registry settings, saving time on configuration. 
• Plist or config profiles method (Mac): Provides an easy way for IT to manage access on macOS, ensuring policy consistency across Apple devices without additional tools. 
• Registry.json method (all platforms): Works across Windows, macOS, and Linux, allowing IT to enforce login on all platforms with a single, flexible configuration file, streamlining policy management for diverse environments.

Each method helps IT secure access, restrict to authorized users, and maintain compliance across all systems. You can enforce login without setting up SSO. Read the documentation to learn more about Docker’s sign-in enforcement methods.  

Single sign-on (SSO) 

Docker Desktop’s SSO capabilities allow organizations to streamline access by integrating with corporate identity providers, ensuring that only authorized team members can access Docker resources using their work credentials. This integration enhances security by eliminating the need for separate Docker-specific passwords, reducing the risk of unauthorized access to critical development tools. With SSO, admins can enforce consistent login policies across teams, simplify user management, and gain greater control over who accesses Docker Desktop. Additionally, SSO enables compliance teams to track access and usage better, aligning with organizational security standards and improving overall security posture.

Docker Desktop supports SSO integrations with a variety of idPs, including Okta, OneLogin, Auth0, and Microsoft Entra ID. By integrating with these IdPs, organizations can streamline user authentication, enhance security, and maintain centralized access control across their Docker environments.

Differences between SSO enforcement and SSO enablement

SSO and SCIM give your company more control over how users log in and attach themselves to your organization and Docker subscription but do not require your users to sign in to your organization when using Docker Desktop. Without sign-in enforcement, users can continue to utilize Docker Desktop without logging in or using their personal Docker IDs or subscriptions, preventing Docker from providing you with insights into their usage and control over the application. 

SSO enforcement usually applies to identity management across multiple applications, enforcing a single, centralized login for a suite of apps or services. However, a registry key or other local login enforcement mechanism typically applies only to that specific application (e.g., Docker Desktop) and doesn’t control access across different services.

Better together: Sign-in enforcement and SSO 

While SSO enables seamless access to Docker for those who choose to log in, enforcing login ensures that users fully benefit from Docker’s productivity and security features.

Docker’s SSO integration is designed to simplify enterprise user management, allowing teams to access Docker with their organization’s centralized credentials. This streamlines onboarding and minimizes password management overhead, enhancing security across the board. However, SSO alone doesn’t require users to log in — it simply makes it more convenient and secure. Without enforced login, users might bypass the sign-in process, missing out on Docker’s full benefits, particularly in areas of security and control.

By coupling SSO with login enforcement, organizations strengthen their Registry Access Management (RAM), ensuring access is restricted to approved registries, boosting image compliance, and centralizing control. Encouraging login alongside SSO ensures teams enjoy a seamless experience while unlocking Docker’s complete suite of features.

Learn more

• Learn how to enforce sign-in for Docker Desktop.
• Find out about single sign-on.
• Read Maximizing Docker Desktop: How Signing In Unlocks Advanced Features.
• Authenticate and update to receive your subscription level’s newest Docker Desktop features.
• New to Docker? Create an account.
• Subscribe to the Docker Newsletter.

If you’ve ever been tangled in the complexities of setting up a WordPress environment, you’re not alone. WordPress powers more than 40% of all websites, making it the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). Its versatility is unmatched, but traditional local development setups like MAMP, WAMP, or XAMPP can lead to inconsistencies and the infamous “it works on my machine” problem.

As projects scale and teams grow, the need for a consistent, scalable, and efficient development environment becomes critical. That’s where Docker comes into play, revolutionizing how we develop and deploy WordPress sites. To make things even smoother, we’ll integrate Traefik, a modern reverse proxy that automatically obtains TLS certificates, ensuring that your site runs securely over HTTPS. Traefik is available as a Docker Official Image from Docker Hub.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll show how to Dockerize your WordPress site using real-world examples. We’ll dive into creating Dockerfiles, containerizing existing WordPress instances — including migrating your data — and setting up Traefik for automatic TLS certificates. Whether you’re starting fresh or migrating an existing site, this tutorial has you covered.

Let’s dive in!

Why should you containerize your WordPress site?

Containerizing your WordPress site offers a multitude of benefits that can significantly enhance your development workflow and overall site performance.

Increased page load speed

Docker containers are lightweight and efficient. By packaging your application and its dependencies into containers, you reduce overhead and optimize resource usage. This can lead to faster page load times, improving user experience and SEO rankings.

Efficient collaboration and version control

With Docker, your entire environment is defined as code. This ensures that every team member works with the same setup, eliminating environment-related discrepancies. Version control systems like Git can track changes to your Dockerfiles and to wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml, making collaboration seamless.

Easy scalability

Scaling your WordPress site to handle increased traffic becomes straightforward with Docker and Traefik. You can spin up multiple Docker containers of your application, and Traefik will manage load balancing and routing, all while automatically handling TLS certificates.

Simplified environment setup

Setting up your development environment becomes as simple as running a few Docker commands. No more manual installations or configurations — everything your application needs is defined in your Docker configuration files.

Simplified updates and maintenance

Updating WordPress or its dependencies is a breeze. Update your Docker images, rebuild your containers, and you’re good to go. Traefik ensures that your routes and certificates are managed dynamically, reducing maintenance overhead.

Getting started with WordPress, Docker, and Traefik

Before we begin, let’s briefly discuss what Docker and Traefik are and how they’ll revolutionize your WordPress development workflow.

• Docker is a cloud-native development platform that simplifies the entire software development lifecycle by enabling developers to build, share, test, and run applications in containers. It streamlines the developer experience while providing built-in security, collaboration tools, and scalable solutions to improve productivity across teams.
• Traefik is a modern reverse proxy and load balancer designed for microservices. It integrates seamlessly with Docker and can automatically obtain and renew TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

How long will this take?

Setting up this environment might take around 45-60 minutes, especially if you’re integrating Traefik for automatic TLS certificates and migrating an existing WordPress site.

Documentation links

• Docker documentation
• Traefik documentation
• WordPress Docker Bitnami image
• Docker Compose documentation

Tools you’ll need

• Docker Desktop: If you don’t already have the latest version installed, download and install Docker Desktop.
• A domain name: Required for Traefik to obtain TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
• Access to DNS settings: To point your domain to your server’s IP address.
• Code editor: Your preferred code editor for editing configuration files.
• Command-line interface (CLI): Access to a terminal or command prompt.
• Existing WordPress data: If you’re containerizing an existing site, ensure you have backups of your WordPress files and MySQL database.

What’s the WordPress Docker Bitnami image?

To simplify the process, we’ll use the Bitnami WordPress image from Docker Hub, which comes pre-packaged with a secure, optimized environment for WordPress. This reduces configuration time and ensures your setup is up to date with the latest security patches.

Using the Bitnami WordPress image streamlines your setup process by:

• Simplifying configuration: Bitnami images come with sensible defaults and configurations that work out of the box, reducing the time spent on setup.
• Enhancing security: The images are regularly updated to include the latest security patches, minimizing vulnerabilities.
• Ensuring consistency: With a standardized environment, you avoid the “it works on my machine” problem and ensure consistency across development, staging, and production.
• Including additional tools: Bitnami often includes helpful tools and scripts for backups, restores, and other maintenance tasks.

By choosing the Bitnami WordPress image, you can leverage a tested and optimized environment, reducing the risk of configuration errors and allowing you to focus more on developing your website.

Key features of Bitnami WordPress Docker image:

• Optimized for production: Configured with performance and security in mind.
• Regular updates: Maintained to include the latest WordPress version and dependencies.
• Ease of use: Designed to be easy to deploy and integrate with other services, such as databases and reverse proxies.
• Comprehensive documentation: Offers guides and support to help you get started quickly.

Why we use Bitnami in the examples:

In our Docker Compose configurations, we specified:

WORDPRESS_IMAGE_TAG=bitnami/wordpress:6.3.1

This indicates that we’re using the Bitnami WordPress image, version 6.3.1. The Bitnami image aligns well with our goals for a secure, efficient, and easy-to-manage WordPress environment, especially when integrating with Traefik for automatic TLS certificates.

By leveraging the Bitnami WordPress Docker image, you’re choosing a robust and reliable foundation for your WordPress projects. This approach allows you to focus on building great websites without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

How to Dockerize an existing WordPress site with Traefik

Let’s walk through dockerizing your WordPress site using practical examples, including your .env and wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml configurations. We’ll also cover how to incorporate your existing data into the Docker containers.

Step 1: Preparing your environment variables

First, create a .env file in the same directory as your wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml file. This file will store all your environment variables.

Example .env file:

# Traefik Variables
TRAEFIK_IMAGE_TAG=traefik:2.9
TRAEFIK_LOG_LEVEL=WARN
TRAEFIK_ACME_EMAIL=your-email@example.com
TRAEFIK_HOSTNAME=traefik.yourdomain.com
# Basic Authentication for Traefik Dashboard
# Username: traefikadmin
# Passwords must be encoded using BCrypt https://hostingcanada.org/htpasswd-generator/
TRAEFIK_BASIC_AUTH=traefikadmin:$$2y$$10$$EXAMPLEENCRYPTEDPASSWORD

# WordPress Variables
WORDPRESS_MARIADB_IMAGE_TAG=mariadb:11.4
WORDPRESS_IMAGE_TAG=bitnami/wordpress:6.6.2
WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=wordpressdb
WORDPRESS_DB_USER=wordpressdbuser
WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=your-db-password
WORDPRESS_DB_ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-db-admin-password
WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX=wpapp_
WORDPRESS_BLOG_NAME=Your Blog Name
WORDPRESS_ADMIN_NAME=AdminFirstName
WORDPRESS_ADMIN_LASTNAME=AdminLastName
WORDPRESS_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
WORDPRESS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-admin-password
WORDPRESS_ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@yourdomain.com
WORDPRESS_HOSTNAME=wordpress.yourdomain.com
WORDPRESS_SMTP_ADDRESS=smtp.your-email-provider.com
WORDPRESS_SMTP_PORT=587
WORDPRESS_SMTP_USER_NAME=your-smtp-username
WORDPRESS_SMTP_PASSWORD=your-smtp-password

Notes:

• Replace placeholder values (e.g., your-email@example.com, your-db-password) with your actual credentials.
• Do not commit this file to version control if it contains sensitive information.
• Use a password encryption tool to generate the encrypted password for TRAEFIK_BASIC_AUTH. For example, you can use the htpasswd generator.

Step 2: Creating the Docker Compose file

Create a wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml file that defines your services, networks, and volumes. This YAML file is crucial for configuring your WordPress installation through Docker.

Example wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml.

networks:
  wordpress-network:
    external: true
  traefik-network:
    external: true

volumes:
  mariadb-data:
  wordpress-data:
  traefik-certificates:

services:
  mariadb:
    image: ${WORDPRESS_MARIADB_IMAGE_TAG}
    volumes:
      - mariadb-data:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MARIADB_DATABASE: ${WORDPRESS_DB_NAME}
      MARIADB_USER: ${WORDPRESS_DB_USER}
      MARIADB_PASSWORD: ${WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD}
      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${WORDPRESS_DB_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
    networks:
      - wordpress-network
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "healthcheck.sh", "--connect", "--innodb_initialized"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 60s
    restart: unless-stopped

  wordpress:
    image: ${WORDPRESS_IMAGE_TAG}
    volumes:
      - wordpress-data:/bitnami/wordpress
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DATABASE_HOST: mariadb
      WORDPRESS_DATABASE_PORT_NUMBER: 3306
      WORDPRESS_DATABASE_NAME: ${WORDPRESS_DB_NAME}
      WORDPRESS_DATABASE_USER: ${WORDPRESS_DB_USER}
      WORDPRESS_DATABASE_PASSWORD: ${WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD}
      WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX: ${WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX}
      WORDPRESS_BLOG_NAME: ${WORDPRESS_BLOG_NAME}
      WORDPRESS_FIRST_NAME: ${WORDPRESS_ADMIN_NAME}
      WORDPRESS_LAST_NAME: ${WORDPRESS_ADMIN_LASTNAME}
      WORDPRESS_USERNAME: ${WORDPRESS_ADMIN_USERNAME}
      WORDPRESS_PASSWORD: ${WORDPRESS_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
      WORDPRESS_EMAIL: ${WORDPRESS_ADMIN_EMAIL}
      WORDPRESS_SMTP_HOST: ${WORDPRESS_SMTP_ADDRESS}
      WORDPRESS_SMTP_PORT: ${WORDPRESS_SMTP_PORT}
      WORDPRESS_SMTP_USER: ${WORDPRESS_SMTP_USER_NAME}
      WORDPRESS_SMTP_PASSWORD: ${WORDPRESS_SMTP_PASSWORD}
    networks:
      - wordpress-network
      - traefik-network
    healthcheck:
      test: timeout 10s bash -c ':> /dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/8080' || exit 1
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 90s
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wordpress.rule=Host(`${WORDPRESS_HOSTNAME}`)"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wordpress.service=wordpress"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wordpress.entrypoints=websecure"
      - "traefik.http.services.wordpress.loadbalancer.server.port=8080"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wordpress.tls=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wordpress.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
      - "traefik.http.services.wordpress.loadbalancer.passhostheader=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wordpress.middlewares=compresstraefik"
      - "traefik.http.middlewares.compresstraefik.compress=true"
      - "traefik.docker.network=traefik-network"
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      mariadb:
        condition: service_healthy
      traefik:
        condition: service_healthy

  traefik:
    image: ${TRAEFIK_IMAGE_TAG}
    command:
      - "--log.level=${TRAEFIK_LOG_LEVEL}"
      - "--accesslog=true"
      - "--api.dashboard=true"
      - "--api.insecure=true"
      - "--ping=true"
      - "--ping.entrypoint=ping"
      - "--entryPoints.ping.address=:8082"
      - "--entryPoints.web.address=:80"
      - "--entryPoints.websecure.address=:443"
      - "--providers.docker=true"
      - "--providers.docker.endpoint=unix:///var/run/docker.sock"
      - "--providers.docker.exposedByDefault=false"
      - "--certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.tlschallenge=true"
      - "--certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.email=${TRAEFIK_ACME_EMAIL}"
      - "--certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.storage=/etc/traefik/acme/acme.json"
      - "--metrics.prometheus=true"
      - "--metrics.prometheus.buckets=0.1,0.3,1.2,5.0"
      - "--global.checkNewVersion=true"
      - "--global.sendAnonymousUsage=false"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - traefik-certificates:/etc/traefik/acme
    networks:
      - traefik-network
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "wget", "http://localhost:8082/ping","--spider"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 5s
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.rule=Host(`${TRAEFIK_HOSTNAME}`)"
      - "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.service=api@internal"
      - "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.entrypoints=websecure"
      - "traefik.http.services.dashboard.loadbalancer.server.port=8080"
      - "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.tls=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
      - "traefik.http.services.dashboard.loadbalancer.passhostheader=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.middlewares=authtraefik"
      - "traefik.http.middlewares.authtraefik.basicauth.users=${TRAEFIK_BASIC_AUTH}"
      - "traefik.http.routers.http-catchall.rule=HostRegexp(`{host:.+}`)"
      - "traefik.http.routers.http-catchall.entrypoints=web"
      - "traefik.http.routers.http-catchall.middlewares=redirect-to-https"
      - "traefik.http.middlewares.redirect-to-https.redirectscheme.scheme=https"
    restart: unless-stopped

Notes:

• Networks: We’re using external networks (wordpress-network and traefik-network). We’ll create these networks before deploying.
• Volumes: Volumes are defined for data persistence.
• Services: We’ve defined mariadb, wordpress, and traefik services with the necessary configurations.
• Health checks: Ensure that services are healthy before dependent services start.
• Labels: Configure Traefik routing, HTTPS settings, and enable the dashboard with basic authentication.

Step 3: Creating external networks

Before deploying your Docker Compose configuration, you need to create the external networks specified in your wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml.

Run the following commands to create the networks:

docker network create traefik-network
docker network create wordpress-network

Step 4: Deploying your WordPress site

Deploy your WordPress site using Docker Compose with the following command (Figure 1):

docker compose -f wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml -p website up -d

Explanation:

• -f wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml: Specifies the Docker Compose file to use.
• -p website: Sets the project name to website.
• up -d: Builds, (re)creates, and starts containers in detached mode.

Step 5: Verifying the deployment

Check that all services are running (Figure 2):

docker ps

You should see the mariadb, wordpress, and traefik services up and running.

Step 6: Accessing your WordPress site and Traefik dashboard

WordPress site: Navigate to https://wordpress.yourdomain.com in your browser. Type in the username and password you set earlier in the .env file and click the Log In button. You should see your WordPress site running over HTTPS, with a valid TLS certificate automatically obtained by Traefik (Figure 3).

Important: To get cryptographic certificates, you need to set up A-type records in your external DNS zone that point to your server’s IP address where Traefik is installed. If you’ve just set up these records, wait a bit before starting the service installation because it can take anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours — sometimes even longer — for these changes to fully spread across DNS servers.

• Traefik dashboard: Access the Traefik dashboard at https://traefik.yourdomain.com. You’ll be prompted for authentication. Use the username and password specified in your .env file (Figure 4).

Step 7: Incorporating your existing WordPress data

If you’re migrating an existing WordPress site, you’ll need to incorporate your existing files and database into the Docker containers.

Step 7.1: Restoring WordPress files

Copy your existing WordPress files into the wordpress-data volume.

Option 1: Using Docker volume mapping

Modify your wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml to map your local WordPress files directly:

volumes:
  - ./your-wordpress-files:/bitnami/wordpress

Option 2: Copying files into the running container

Assuming your WordPress backup is in ./wordpress-backup, run:

docker cp ./wordpress-backup/. wordpress_wordpress_1:/bitnami/wordpress/

Step 7.2: Importing your database

Export your existing WordPress database using mysqldump or phpMyAdmin.

Example:

mysqldump -u your_db_user -p your_db_name > wordpress_db_backup.sql

Copy the database backup into the MariaDB container:

docker cp wordpress_db_backup.sql wordpress_mariadb_1:/wordpress_db_backup.sql

Access the MariaDB container:

docker exec -it wordpress_mariadb_1 bash

Import the database:

mysql -u root -p${WORDPRESS_DB_ADMIN_PASSWORD} ${WORDPRESS_DB_NAME} < wordpress_db_backup.sql

Step 7.3: Update wp-config.php (if necessary)

Because we’re using environment variables, WordPress should automatically connect to the database. However, if you have custom configurations, ensure they match the settings in your .env file.

Note: The Bitnami WordPress image manages wp-config.php automatically based on environment variables. If you need to customize it further, you can create a custom Dockerfile.

Step 8: Creating a custom Dockerfile (optional)

If you need to customize the WordPress image further, such as installing additional PHP extensions or modifying configuration files, create a Dockerfile in your project directory.

Example Dockerfile:

# Use the Bitnami WordPress image as the base
FROM bitnami/wordpress:6.3.1

# Install additional PHP extensions if needed
# RUN install_packages php7.4-zip php7.4-mbstring

# Copy custom wp-content (if not using volume mapping)
# COPY ./wp-content /bitnami/wordpress/wp-content

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /bitnami/wordpress

# Expose port 8080
EXPOSE 8080

Build the custom image:

Modify your wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml to build from the Dockerfile:

wordpress:
  build: .
  # Rest of the configuration

Then, rebuild your containers:

docker compose -p wordpress up -d --build

Step 9: Customizing WordPress within Docker

Adding themes and plugins

Because we’ve mapped the wordpress-data volume, any changes you make within the WordPress container (like installing plugins or themes) will persist across container restarts.

• Via WordPress admin dashboard: Install themes and plugins as you normally would through the WordPress admin interface (Figure 5).

• Manually: Access the container and place your themes or plugins directly.

Example:

docker exec -it wordpress_wordpress_1 bash
cd /bitnami/wordpress/wp-content/themes
# Add your theme files here

Managing and scaling WordPress with Docker and Traefik

Scaling your WordPress service

To handle increased traffic, you might want to scale your WordPress instances.

docker compose -p wordpress up -d --scale wordpress=3

Traefik will automatically detect the new instances and load balance traffic between them.

Note: Ensure that your WordPress setup supports scaling. You might need to externalize session storage or use a shared filesystem for media uploads.

Updating services

To update your services to the latest images:

Pull the latest images:

docker compose -p wordpress pull

Recreate containers:

docker compose -p wordpress up -d

Monitoring and logs

Docker logs:
View logs for a specific service:

docker compose -p wordpress logs -f wordpress

Traefik dashboard:
Use the Traefik dashboard to monitor routing, services, and health checks.

Optimizing your WordPress Docker setup

Implementing caching with Redis

To improve performance, you can add Redis for object caching.

Update wordpress-traefik-letsencrypt-compose.yml:

services:
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    networks:
      - wordpress-network
    restart: unless-stopped

Configure WordPress to use Redis:

• Install a Redis caching plugin like Redis Object Cache.
• Configure it to connect to the redis service.

Security best practices

• Secure environment variables:
  • Use Docker secrets or environment variables to manage sensitive information securely.
  • Avoid committing sensitive data to version control.
• Restrict access to Docker socket:
  • The Docker socket is mounted read-only (:ro) to minimize security risks.
• Keep images updated:
  • Regularly update your Docker images to include security patches and improvements.

Advanced Traefik configurations

• Middleware: Implement middleware for rate limiting, IP whitelisting, and other request transformations.
• Monitoring: Integrate with monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana for advanced insights.
• Wildcard certificates: Configure Traefik to use wildcard certificates if you have multiple subdomains.

Wrapping up

Dockerizing your WordPress site with Traefik simplifies your development and deployment processes, offering consistency, scalability, and efficiency. By leveraging practical examples and incorporating your existing data, we’ve created a tailored guide to help you set up a robust WordPress environment.

Whether you’re managing an existing site or starting a new project, this setup empowers you to focus on what you do best — developing great websites — while Docker and Traefik handle the heavy lifting.

So go ahead, give it a shot! Embracing these tools is a step toward modernizing your workflow and staying ahead in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Learn more

To further enhance your skills and optimize your setup, check out these resources:

• Subscribe to the Docker Newsletter
• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop
• Docker documentation
• Compose file reference
• WordPress Docker Bitnami image
• Traefik documentation
• Understand Docker networking
• Manage sensitive data with Docker secrets
• WordPress plugins for Docker
• Redis object cache plugin
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

Key features of the Docker Desktop 4.35 release include: 

• Secure development environments with organization access tokens (Beta) 
• Docker Home enhances your Docker experience (Beta) 
• Accelerate development with a terminal in Docker Desktop (GA)  
• Volumes Export (GA)
• Improved performance on macOS
• Docker Desktop for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Organization access tokens (Beta) 

Before the beta release of organization access tokens, managing developer access to Docker resources was challenging, as it relied heavily on individual user accounts, leading to security risks and administrative inefficiencies. 

Organization access tokens let you manage access at the organizational level, providing enhanced security. This feature allows teams to operate more securely and efficiently with centralized user management, reduced administrative overhead, and the flexibility to scale access as the organization grows. For businesses, this feature offers significant value by improving governance, enhancing security, and supporting scalable infrastructure from an administrative perspective. 

Organizational access tokens empower organizations to maintain tighter control over their resources and security, making Docker Desktop even more valuable for enterprise users. This is one piece of the continuous updates we’re releasing to support administrators across large enterprise companies, ensuring they have the tools needed to manage complex environments with efficiency and confidence.

Docker Home (Beta) 

Sign in to your Docker account to see the release of the new Docker Home page (Figure 1). The new Docker Home marks a milestone in Docker’s journey as a multi-product company, reinforcing Docker’s commitment to providing an expanding suite of solutions that help developers and businesses containerize applications with ease.

• Unified experience: The home page provides a central hub for users to access Docker products, manage subscriptions, adjust settings, and find resources — all in one place. This approach simplifies navigation for developers and admins.
• Admin access: Administrators can manage organizations, users, and onboarding processes through the new portal, with access to dashboards for monitoring Docker usage.
• Future enhancements: Future updates will add personalized features for different roles, and business subscribers will gain access to tools like the Docker Support portal and organization-wide notifications.

Terminal experience in Docker Desktop

Our terminal feature in Docker Desktop is now generally available. While managing containerized applications, developers have often faced friction and inefficiencies when switching between the Docker Desktop CLI and GUI. This constant context switching disrupted workflows and reduced productivity. 

The terminal enhancement integrates a terminal directly within the Docker Desktop GUI, enabling seamless transitions between CLI and GUI interactions within a single window. By incorporating a terminal shell into the Docker Desktop interface (Figure 2), we significantly reduce the friction associated with context switching for developers.

This functionality is designed to streamline workflows, accelerate delivery times, and enhance overall developer productivity.

Volumes Export is GA 

With the 4.35 release, we’ve elevated volume backup capabilities in Docker Desktop, introducing an upgraded feature set (Figure 3). This enhancement directly integrates the previous Volumes Backup & Share extension directly into Docker Desktop, streamlining your backup processes.

Although this release marks a significant step forward, it’s just the beginning. We’re committed to expanding these capabilities, adding even more value in future updates. Check out the beta of Scheduled Backups as well as External Cloud Storage backups, which are also available. 

Significantly improved performance experience on macOS (Beta)

Docker Desktop 4.35 also includes a beta release of Docker VMM, a container-optimized hypervisor for Apple Silicon Macs. Local developer workflows rely heavily on the performance of the hypervisor layer for everything from handling individual timer interrupts to accessing files and downloading images from the network. 

Docker VMM allows us to optimize the Linux kernel and hypervisor layer together, massively improving the speed of many common developer tasks. For example, iterating over a large shared file system with find is now 2x faster than on Docker Desktop 4.34 with a cold cache and up to 25x faster — faster than running natively on the Mac — when the cache is warm. This is only the beginning. Thanks to Docker VMM, we have many exciting new performance improvements in the pipeline.

Enable Docker VMM via Settings > General > Virtual Machine options and try it for your developer workflows today (Figure 4).

Docker Desktop for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Docker Desktop for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This feature marks a great milestone for both Docker and our growing community of developers.

By making Docker Desktop available on RHEL, we’re not only extending our reach — we’re meeting developers where they are. RHEL users can now access a seamless containerized development experience directly on the same OS that might power their production environments.

Docker Desktop for RHEL (Figure 5) offers the same intuitive interface, integrated tooling, and performance optimizations that you’ve come to expect on the other supported Linux distributions.

How to install Docker Desktop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Download links and information can be found in our release notes. 

Looking for support?

Did you know that you can get Premium Customer Support for Docker Desktop with a Pro or Team subscription? With this GA release, we’re now ready to officially help support you if you’re thinking about using Docker Desktop. Check out our pricing page to learn more about what’s included in a Pro or Team subscription, and if it’s right for you.

Explore the latest updates

With this latest wave of updates, from the security enhancements of organization access tokens to the performance boost of Docker VMM for Apple Silicon Macs, we’re pushing Docker Desktop forward to meet the evolving needs of developers and organizations alike. Each new feature is designed to make development smoother, faster, and more secure — whether you’re managing large teams or optimizing your individual workflow. 

We’re continuing to make improvements, with more tools and features on the way to help you build, manage, and scale your projects efficiently. Explore the latest updates and see how they can enhance your development experience

Learn more

• Subscribe to the Docker Newsletter.
• Authenticate and update to receive your subscription level’s newest Docker Desktop features.
• New to Docker? Create an account.
• Learn more about host networking support.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.

Docker Desktop is more than just a local application for containerized development — it’s your gateway to an integrated suite of cloud-native tools that streamline the entire development workflow. While Docker Desktop can be used without signing in, doing so unlocks the full potential of Docker’s powerful, interconnected ecosystem. By signing in, you gain access to advanced features and services across Docker Hub, Build Cloud, Scout, and Testcontainers Cloud, enabling deeper collaboration, enhanced security insights, and scalable cloud resources. 

This blog post explores the full range of capabilities unlocked by signing in to Docker Desktop, connecting you to Docker’s integrated suite of cloud-native development tools. From enhanced security insights with Docker Scout to scalable build and testing resources through Docker Build Cloud and Testcontainers Cloud, signing in allows developers and administrators to fully leverage Docker’s unified platform.

Note that the following sections refer to specific Docker subscription plans. With Docker’s newly streamlined subscription plans — Docker Personal, Docker Pro, Docker Team, and Docker Business — developers and organizations can access a scalable suite of tools, from individual productivity boosters to enterprise-grade governance and security. Visit the Docker pricing page to learn more about how these plans support different team sizes and workflows. 

Benefits for developers when logged in

Docker Personal

• Access to private repositories: Unlock secure collaboration through private repositories on Docker Hub, ensuring that your sensitive code and dependencies are managed securely across teams and projects.
• Increased pull rate: Boost your productivity with an increased pull rate from Docker Hub (40 pulls/hour per user), ensuring smoother, uninterrupted development workflows without waiting on rate limits. The rate limit without authentication is 10 pulls/hour per IP.
• Docker Scout CLI: Leverage Docker Scout to proactively secure your software supply chain with continuous security insights from code to production. By signing in, you gain access to powerful CLI commands that help prevent vulnerabilities before they reach production. 
• Build Cloud and Testcontainers Cloud: Experience the full power of Docker Build Cloud and Testcontainers Cloud with free trials (7-day for Build Cloud, 30-day for Testcontainers Cloud). These trials give you access to scalable cloud infrastructure that speeds up image builds and enables more reliable integration testing.

Docker Pro/Team/Business 

For users with a paid Docker subscription, additional features are unlocked.

• Unlimited pull rate: No Hub rate limit will be enforced for users with a paid subscription plan. 
• Docker Scout base image recommendations: Docker Scout offers continuous recommendations for base image updates, empowering developers to secure their applications at the foundational level and fix vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle.

• Docker Debug: The docker debug CLI command can help you debug containers, while the images contain the minimum required to run your application.

Docker Debug functionalities have also been integrated into the container view of the Docker Desktop UI.

• Synchronized file shares: Host to Docker Desktop VM file sharing via bind mounts can be quite slow for large codebases. Speed up your development cycle with synchronized file shares, allowing you to sync large codebases into containers quickly and efficiently without performance bottlenecks—helping developers iterate faster on critical projects.

• Additional free minutes for Docker Build Cloud: Docker Build Cloud helps developer teams speed up image builds by offloading the build process to the cloud. The following benefits are available for users depending on the subscription plan. 
  • Docker Pro: 200 mins/month per org
  • Docker Team: 500 mins/month per org
  • Docker Business: 1500 mins/month per org

• Additional free minutes for Testcontainers Cloud: Testcontainers Cloud simplifies the process for developers to run reliable integration tests using real dependencies defined in code, whether on their laptops or within their team’s CI pipeline. Depending on the subscription plan, the following benefits are available for users:
  • Docker Pro: 100 mins/month per org
  • Docker Team: 500 mins/month per org
  • Docker Business: 1,500 mins/month per org

Benefits for administrators when your users are logged in

Docker Business

Security and governance

The Docker Business plan offers enterprise-grade security and governance controls, which are only applicable if users are signed in. As of Docker Desktop 4.35.0, these features include:

• Image Access Management and Registry Access Management: Enhance security governance by controlling exactly which images and registries your developers can access or push to, ensuring compliance with organizational security policies and minimizing risk exposure.
• Settings management: Enforce organization-wide security policies by locking default settings across Docker Desktop instances, ensuring consistent configuration and compliance throughout your team’s development environment.
• Enhanced Container Isolation: Protect developer environments from malicious containers with rootless containers and much more.
• Air-gapped containers: Restrict network activity originating from containers.
• Private extensions marketplace: Limit Docker Desktop extensions that developers can install.
• Kerberos and NTLM authentication for proxies: Centralize Docker Desktop authentication to network proxies without prompts.
• SOCKS5 proxy support: Enable the usage of SOCKS5 proxies for Docker Desktop.

License management

Tracking usage for licensing purposes can be challenging for administrators due to Docker Desktop not requiring authentication by default. By ensuring all users are signed in, administrators can use Docker Hub’s organization members list to manage licenses effectively.

This can be coupled with Docker Business’s Single Sign-On and SCIM capabilities to ease this process further. 

Insights

Administrators and other stakeholders (such as engineering managers) must comprehensively understand Docker Desktop usage within their organization. With developers signed into Docker Desktop, admins gain actionable insights into usage, from feature adoption to image usage trends and login activity, helping administrators optimize team performance and security. A dashboard offering insights is now available to simplify monitoring. Contact your account rep to enable the dashboard.

Enforce sign-in for Docker Desktop

Docker Desktop includes a feature that allows administrators to require authentication at start-up. Admins can ensure that all developers sign in to access Docker Desktop, enabling full integration with Docker’s security and productivity features. Sign-in enforcement helps maintain continuous compliance with governance policies across the organization.

Developers can then click on the sign-in button, which takes them through the authentication flow. 

More information on how to enforce sign-in can be found in the documentation. 

Unlock the full potential of Docker’s integrated suite

Signing into Docker Desktop unlocks significant benefits for both developers and administrators, enabling teams to fully leverage Docker’s integrated, cloud-native suite. Whether improving productivity, securing the software supply chain, or enforcing governance policies, signing in maximizes the value of Docker’s unified platform — especially for organizations using Docker’s paid subscription plans.

Note that new features are introduced with each new release, so keep an eye on our blog and subscribe to the Docker Newsletter for the latest product and feature updates.

Up next

• Read Announcing Upgraded Docker Plans: Simpler, More Value, Better Development and Productivity.
• Learn more about the new Docker subscriptions.
• Get started with Docker Desktop.
• Subscribe to the Docker Newsletter.

labwc – a new Wayland compositor

Today we are releasing a new version of Raspberry Pi OS. This version includes a significant change, albeit one that we hope most people won’t even notice. So we thought we’d better tell you about it to make sure you do…

First, a brief history lesson. Linux desktops, like their Unix predecessors, have for many years used the X Window system. This is the underlying technology which displays the desktop, handles windows, moves the mouse, and all that other stuff that you don’t really think about because it (usually) just works. X is prehistoric in computing terms, serving us well since the early 80s. But after 40 years, cracks are beginning to show in the design of X.

As a result, many Linux distributions are moving to a new windowing technology called Wayland. Wayland has many advantages over X, particularly performance. Under X, two separate applications help draw a window:

• the display server creates windows on the screen and gives applications a place to draw their content
• the window manager positions windows relative to each other and decorates windows with title bars and frames.

Wayland combines these two functions into a single application called the compositor. Applications running on a Wayland system only need to talk to one thing, instead of two, to display a window. As you might imagine, this is a much more efficient way to draw application windows.

Wayland also provides a security advantage. Under X, all applications communicated back and forth with the display server; consequently, any application could observe any other application. Wayland isolates applications at the compositor level, so applications cannot observe each other.

We first started thinking about Wayland at Raspberry Pi around ten years ago; at that time, it was nowhere near ready to use. Over the last few years, we have taken cautious steps towards Wayland. When we released Bullseye back in 2021, we switched to a new X window manager, mutter, which could also be used as a Wayland compositor. We included the option to switch it to Wayland mode to see how it worked.

With the release of Bookworm in 2023, we replaced mutter with a new dedicated Wayland compositor called wayfire and made Wayland the default mode of operation for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, while continuing to run X on lower-powered models. We spent a lot of time optimising wayfire for Raspberry Pi hardware, but it still didn’t run well enough on older Pis, so we couldn’t switch to it everywhere.

All of this was a learning experience – we learned more about Wayland, how it interacted with our hardware, and what we needed to do to get the best out of it. As we continued to work with wayfire, we realised it was developing in a direction that would make it less compatible with our hardware. At this point, we knew it wasn’t the best choice to provide a good Wayland experience for Raspberry Pis. So we started looking at alternatives.

This search eventually led us to a compositor called labwc. Our initial experiments were encouraging: we were able to use it in Raspberry Pi OS after only a few hours of work. Closer investigation revealed labwc to be a much better fit for the Raspberry Pi graphics hardware than wayfire. We contacted the developers and found that their future direction very much aligned with our own.

labwc is built on top of a system called wlroots, a set of libraries which provide the basic functionality of a Wayland system. wlroots has been developed closely alongside the Wayland protocol. Using wlroots, anyone who wants to write a Wayland compositor doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel; we can take advantage of the experience of those who designed Wayland, since they know it best.

So we made the decision to switch. For most of this year, we have been working on porting labwc to the Raspberry Pi Desktop. This has very much been a collaborative process with the developers of both labwc and wlroots: both have helped us immensely with their support as we contribute features and optimisations needed for our desktop.

After much optimisation for our hardware, we have reached the point where labwc desktops run just as fast as X on older Raspberry Pi models. Today, we make the switch with our latest desktop image: Raspberry Pi Desktop now runs Wayland by default across all models.

When you update an existing installation of Bookworm, you will see a prompt asking to switch to labwc the next time you reboot:

We recommend that most people switch to labwc.

Existing Pi 4 or 5 Bookworm installations running wayfire shouldn’t change in any noticeable way, besides the loss of a couple of animations which we haven’t yet implemented in labwc. Because we will no longer support wayfire with updates on Raspberry Pi OS, it’s best to adopt labwc as soon as possible.

Older Pis that currently use X should also switch to labwc. To ensure backwards compatibility with older applications, labwc includes a library called Xwayland, which provides a virtual X implementation running on top of Wayland. labwc provides this virtual implementation automatically for any application that isn’t compatible with Wayland. With Xwayland, you can continue to use older applications that you rely on while benefiting from the latest security and performance updates.

As with any software update, we cannot possibly test all possible configurations and applications. If you switch to labwc and experience an issue, you can always switch back to X. To do this, open a terminal window and type:

sudo raspi-config 

This launches the command-line Raspberry Pi Configuration application. Use the arrow keys to select “6 Advanced Options” and hit ‘enter’ to open the menu. Select “A6 Wayland” and choose “W1 X11 Openbox window manager with X11 backend”. Hit ‘escape’ to exit the application; when you restart your device, your desktop should restart with X.

We don’t expect this to be necessary for many people, but the option is there, just in case! Of course, if you prefer to stick with wayfire or X for any reason, the upgrade prompt offers you the option to do so – this is not a compulsory upgrade, just one that we recommend.

Improved touch screen support

While labwc is the biggest change to the OS in this release, it’s not the only one. We have also significantly improved support for using the Desktop with a touch screen. Specifically, Raspberry Pi Desktop now automatically shows and hides the virtual keyboard, and supports right-click and double-click equivalents for touch displays.

This change comes as a result of integrating the Squeekboard virtual keyboard. When the system detects a touch display, the virtual keyboard automatically displays at the bottom of the screen whenever it is possible to enter text. The keyboard also automatically hides when no text entry is possible.

This auto show and hide should work with most applications, but it isn’t supported by everything. For applications which do not support it, you can instead use the keyboard icon at the right end of the taskbar to manually toggle the keyboard on and off.

If you don’t want to use the virtual keyboard with a touch screen, or you want to use it without a touch screen and click on it with the mouse, you can turn it on or off in the Display tab of Raspberry Pi Configuration. The new virtual keyboard only works with labwc; it’s not compatible with wayfire or X.

In addition to the virtual keyboard, we added long press detection on touch screens to generate the equivalent of a right-click with a mouse. You can use this to launch context-sensitive menus anywhere in the taskbar and the file manager.

We also added double-tap detection on touch screens to generate a double-click. While this previously worked on X, it didn’t work in wayfire. Double-tap to double-click is now supported in labwc.

Better Raspberry Pi Connect integration

We’ve had a lot of very positive feedback about Raspberry Pi Connect, our remote access software that allows you to control your Raspberry Pi from any computer anywhere in the world. This release integrates Connect into the Desktop.

By default, you will now see the Connect icon in the taskbar at all times. Previously, this indicated that Connect was running. Now, the icon indicates that Connect is installed and ready to use, but is not necessarily running. Hovering the mouse over the icon brings up a tooltip displaying the current status.

You can now enable or disable Connect directly from the menu which pops up when the icon is clicked. Previously, this was an option in Raspberry Pi Configuration, but that option has been removed. Now, all the options to control Connect live in the icon menu.

If you don’t plan to use Connect, you can uninstall it from Recommended Software, or you can remove the icon from the taskbar by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing “Add / Remove Plugins…”.

Other things

This release includes some other small changes worth mentioning:

• We rewrote the panel application for the taskbar at the top of the screen. In the previous version, even if you removed a plugin from the panel, it remained in memory. Now, when you remove a plugin, the panel never loads it into memory at all. Rather than all the individual plugins being part of a single application, each plugin is now a separate library. The panel only loads the libraries for the plugins that you choose to display on your screen. This won’t make much difference to many people, but can save you a bit of RAM if you remove several plugins. This also makes it easier to develop new plugins, both for us and third parties.

• We introduced a new Screen Configuration tool, raindrop. This works exactly the same as the old version, arandr, and even looks similar. Under the hood, we rewrote the old application in C to improve support for labwc and touch screens. Because the new tool is native, performance should be snappier! Going forward, we’ll only maintain the new native version.

How to get it

The new release is available today in apt, Raspberry Pi Imager, or as a download from the software page on raspberrypi.com.

sudo apt install labwc

To update an existing Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm install to this release, run the following commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt full-upgrade

When you next reboot, you will see the prompt described above which offers the switch to labwc.

To switch to the new Screen Configuration tool, run the following commands:

sudo apt purge arandr

sudo apt install raindrop

The new on-screen keyboard can either be installed from Recommended Software – it’s called Squeekboard – or from the command line with:

sudo apt install squeekboard wfplug-squeek

We hope you like the new desktop experience. Or perhaps more accurately, we hope you won’t notice much difference! As always, your comments are very welcome below.

The post A new release of Raspberry Pi OS appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

At Docker, innovation and efficiency are integral to how we operate. When our own IT team needed to deploy Docker Desktop to various teams, including non-engineering roles like customer support and technical sales, the existing process was functional but manual and time-consuming. Recognizing the need for a more streamlined and secure approach, we leveraged new Early Access (EA) Docker Business features to refine our deployment strategy.

A seamless deployment process

Faced with the challenge of managing diverse requirements across the organization, we knew it was time to enhance our deployment methods.

The Docker IT team transitioned from using registry.json files to a more efficient method involving registry keys and new MSI installers for Windows, along with configuration profiles and PKG installers for macOS. This transition simplified deployment, provided better control for admins, and allowed for faster rollouts across the organization.

“From setup to deployment, it took 24 hours. We started on a Monday morning, and by the next day, it was done,” explains Jeffrey Strauss, Head of Docker IT. 

Enhancing security and visibility

Security is always a priority. By integrating login enforcement with single sign-on (SSO) and System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM), Docker IT ensured centralized control and compliance with security policies. The Docker Desktop Insights Dashboard (EA) offered crucial visibility into how Docker Desktop was being used across the organization. Admins could now see which versions were installed and monitor container usage, enabling informed decisions about updates, resource allocation, and compliance. (Docker Business customers can learn more about access and timelines by contacting their account reps. The Insights Dashboard is only available to Docker Business customers with enforced authentication for organization users.)

Steven Novick, Docker’s Principal Product Manager, emphasized, “With the new solution, deployment was simpler and tamper-proof, giving a clear picture of Docker usage within the organization.”

Benefits beyond deployment

The improvements made by Docker IT extended beyond just deployment efficiency:

• Improved visibility: The Insights Dashboard provided detailed data on Docker usage, helping ensure all users are connected to the organization.
• Efficient deployment: Docker Desktop was deployed to hundreds of computers within 24 hours, significantly reducing administrative overhead.
• Enhanced security: Centralized control to enforce authentication via MDM tools like Intune for Windows and Jamf for macOS strengthened security and compliance.
• Seamless user experience: Early and transparent communication ensured a smooth transition, minimizing disruptions.

Looking ahead

The successful deployment of Docker Desktop within 24 hours demonstrates Docker’s commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. We are excited about the future developments in Docker Desktop management and look forward to supporting our customers as they achieve their goals with Docker. 

Existing Docker Business customers can learn more about access and timelines by contacting their account reps. The Insights Dashboard is only available in Early Access to select Docker Business customers with enforced authentication for organization users.

Curious about how Docker’s new features can benefit your team? Get in touch to discover more or explore our customer stories to see how others are succeeding with Docker.

Learn more

• Read the Docker IT case study to learn more.
• Subscribe to the Docker Newsletter. 
• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

DevOps brings together developers and operations teams to create better software by introducing organizational principles that encourage communication, collaboration, innovation, speed, security, and agility throughout the software development lifecycle. And, the popularity and adoption rates of DevOps continue to grow, with 83% of 10,000 global developers surveyed saying that they use the principles, according to an April 2024 report commissioned by the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), a Linux Foundation project.

DevOps includes everything from continuous integration/improvement and continuous deployment/delivery (CI/CD) as code is created and modified, to critical automation capabilities covering a wide range of development processes. Also built into DevOps principles is a focus on creating better applications from code conception all the way through to end-user experiences. Before this unified framework existed, code typically was created in separate silos that did not easily allow collaboration or foster efficient management, speed, or quality. These conditions eventually inspired the DevOps framework and principles.  

DevOps principles and practices also help organizations by constantly integrating user feedback regarding application features, shortcomings, and code glitches, thereby reducing security and operational risks in code as it reaches production.

This blog post aims to help enterprises focus on one of these critical DevOps capabilities in particular — the use of automation to speed and streamline processes across the development lifecycle of applications — to further expand and drive the benefits of using DevOps processes within an organization.

As DevOps use continues to grow, more developers are finding that the Docker containerization platform integrates well as a crucial component of DevOps practices, especially due to its built-in automation features and capabilities.

What is DevOps automation?

DevOps automation is a major time-saver for developers and operations teams because it automates labor-intensive and repetitive processes that can free up developers to instead work on new code innovations and ideas that can create business value.  

Automating repetitive manual tasks using DevOps automation tools drives notable efficiencies and productivity boosts for developers and organizations, using automatic actions that eliminate frequent developer or operations team intervention. 

What DevOps processes can you automate?

DevOps automation is especially valuable because it can be used on a broad spectrum of tasks in the application development environment, including CI/CD pipelines and workflows, code writing, monitoring and logging, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. It can also help improve and streamline configuration management, infrastructure provisioning, unit tests, code testing, security steps and scans, troubleshooting, code review, deploying and delivering code, project management, and more.

By bringing beneficial and time-saving automation to the DevOps lifecycle, developers can create cleaner and more secure code with much less manual intervention and human error compared to traditional software development methods. 

Benefits of DevOps automation tools

For development and operations teams, using DevOps automation to streamline and improve their operations goes far beyond just reducing human error rates and increasing the efficiency and speed of code creation and the deployment process.

Other benefits of DevOps automation include improved consistency and reliability, delivery of predictable and repeatable results, and enhanced scalability and manageability of multiple applications and processes. These benefits become possible with automation because it reduces many human mistakes and miscalculations.

DevOps automation benefits can also include smoother collaboration among multiple developers working on applications at the same time by automatically handling merge conflicts, and performing automatic code testing for multiple developers at once. Automation that troubleshoots applications can also speed up project development times by immediately notifying systems personnel of problems as they arise.

How to automate DevOps with Docker

As a flexible tool for DevOps automation, Docker is available in four subscription levels, from the free Docker Personal version to the top-of-the-line Docker Business tier. 

Docker Business delivers a wide range of helpful tools that empower DevOps teams to identify development bottlenecks where automation can free up resources and resolve repetitive tasks and operations. The following tools are included with Docker Business. (Read our September 2024 announcement about upgraded Docker subscription plans that will deliver even more value, flexibility, and power to your development workflows.) 

Docker Image Access Management

With Docker Business, developers and operations teams can quickly start automating tasks using features such as Docker Image Access Management, which gives administrators control over the types of container images that developers can pull and use from Docker Hub. This includes Docker Official Images, Docker Verified Publisher Images, and community images. Using Image Access Management, developers and teams can more easily search private registries and community repositories for needed container images to use to build their applications. 

Image Access Management allows organizations to give developers freedom of choice while providing some guardrails to prevent developers from accidentally using untrusted, malicious community images as components of their applications. This is an important benefit, compared with only allowing developers to use a handful of internally built images, for example.

Docker Image Access Management is available only to Docker Business customers.  

Docker automated testing 

Other Docker DevOps automation features include automated testing, including source code repository testing, that can be done through Docker Hub to automatically test changes to source code repositories using containers. Any Docker Hub repository can enable an autotest function to run tests on pull requests to the source code repository to create a continuous integration testing service.

Automated test files to perform the tests can be set up by creating a docker-compose.test.yml file, which defines a service that lists the tests to be run. The docker-compose.test.yml file should be placed in the same directory that contains the Dockerfile used to build the image.

Hardened Docker Desktop

To automate security within Docker, administrators can use a wide range of features within Hardened Docker Desktop, which is available to Docker Business subscribers. Hardened Docker Desktop security features aim to bolster the security of developer environments while causing minimal speed or performance impacts on developer experiences or productivity. 

These features allow administrators to enforce strict security settings, which prevent developers and containers from bypassing the controls intentionally or unintentionally. The features also enable enhanced container isolation capabilities to prevent potential security threats, such as malicious payloads, from breaching the Docker Desktop Linux VM and the underlying host.

Using Hardened Docker Desktop, security administrators can take more control and ownership over Docker Desktop configurations, removing and preventing potential changes by users, which is vital for security-conscious organizations.

Automated builds

Another automation and productivity tool is the Docker Automated builds feature, which automatically builds images from source code in an external repository and then pushes the built image to designated Docker repositories. Available in the Docker Business, Pro, or Teams tiers, Automated builds — also called autobuilds — create a list of branches and tags that can be built into Docker images using a series of commands. Automated builds can handle images of up to 10 GB in size.

Enhanced collaboration tools 

Throughout Docker’s unified suite, tools built to deliver enhanced collaboration are available to developers and operations teams to work together to get the most out of their projects and applications.

Everything from Docker Desktop to Docker Engine, Docker CLI, Docker Compose, Docker Build/BuildKit, Docker Desktop Extensions, and more are designed to enable developers and operations teams to accelerate productivity, reduce code errors, increase security, drive innovation, and save valuable time throughout the software development process. 

Easier scaling and orchestration with Kubernetes integration

Docker’s containerization platform also integrates well with the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, optimizing the developer experience for container development, deployment, and management. Docker and Kubernetes can work together using Docker Engine as a user-friendly and secure foundation for basic Kubernetes (K8s) functionality, or by using Docker Desktop for a more comprehensive approach that avoids potential challenges associated with do-it-yourself container configurations. Docker Desktop includes K8s setup at the push of a button, which is one of its numerous and useful automation features. 

Support and troubleshooting 

As Docker continues to mature, its knowledge base is constantly being expanded and deepened, with core documentation and resources freely available to Docker developers within the Docker ecosystem. And, because Docker uses a collaborative approach between developers and operations teams, developers can often find common answers to their inquiries and learn from each other to tackle most issues.

More information and help about using Docker can be found in the Docker Training page, which offers live and on-demand training and other resources to help developers and teams negotiate their Docker landscapes and learn fresh skills to resolve technical problems. 

Other resources: Docker Scout and Docker Build Cloud

Docker offers even more tools to help with automation, collaboration, and creating better and more nimble code for developer teams and operations managers.

Docker Scout, for example, is built to help organizations better protect their software supply chain security when using container images, which may contain software elements that are susceptible to security vulnerabilities. 

Docker Scout helps with this issue by proactively analyzing container images and compiling a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), which is a detailed inventory of code included in an application or container. That SBOM is then matched against a continuously updated vulnerability database to pinpoint and correct security weaknesses to help make the code more secure.

Docker Build Cloud is a Docker service to help developers build container images more quickly, both locally and in the cloud. Those builds run on cloud infrastructure that requires no configuration and where the environment is optimally dimensioned for all workloads using a remote build cache. This approach ensures fast builds anywhere for all team members. 

To use Docker Build Cloud, developers take the same steps they would take for a regular build using the command docker buildx build. With a regular build command, the build runs on a local instance of BuildKit, bundled with the Docker daemon. But when using Docker Build Cloud, the build request is sent to a BuildKit instance running remotely, in the cloud, with all data encrypted in transit. Docker Build Cloud provides several benefits over local builds, including faster build speed, shared build cache, and native multi-platform builds.

Future trends in DevOps automation

As DevOps automation continues to mature, it will gain more capabilities from artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), serverless architectures, cloud-native platforms, and other technologies across the IT landscape. 

Such advancements can be found in Docker’s AI collaborations with NVIDIA. For example, Docker Desktop dovetails with the NVIDIA AI Workbench, which is an easy-to-use toolkit that lets developers create, test, and customize AI and machine learning models on a PC or workstation and then scale them to a data center or public cloud. NVIDIA AI Workbench makes interactive development workflows easier, while automating technical tasks that can halt beginners and derail experts. 

DevOps automation is ripe for further improvements and enhancements from AI and ML in areas of agility, process improvements, and more for developers and operations teams. AI and ML will drive further labor savings for software development teams by delivering fresh new automated, self-service tools that free them up from a broader range of routine tasks, giving them more time to conduct valuable and critical work that will drive their companies forward.

Docker will be an important part of this changing landscape as the unified suites and tools continue to expand and deliver further new benefits and capabilities to DevOps, the Docker ecosystem, and developers and operations teams around the world.

Wrapping up

Improving DevOps automation by using the Docker containerization platform inside your business organization is a smart strategy that helps developers and operations teams deliver their best work with efficiency, creativity, and broad collaboration.

Docker Business plays a leadership role in enhancing DevOps automation in companies around the world as they look to automate their DevOps operations effectively.

Ready to automate your team’s DevOps processes? Find out how Docker Business can transform your development, or if you still have questions, reach out to one of our experts to get started!

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Containers might seem like a relatively recent technological breakthrough, but their origins trace back to the 1970s when Unix systems first used container-like concepts to isolate applications. Fast-forward to 2013, and Docker revolutionized this idea by introducing a portable, user-friendly container platform, sparking widespread adoption. In 2015, Docker was instrumental in creating the Open Container Initiative (OCI) to promote open standards within the container ecosystem. With the stability provided by the OCI, container technology spread throughout the tech world.

Although Docker Desktop is the leading tool for creating containerized applications, Docker remains surrounded by numerous misconceptions. In this article, we’ll debunk the top Docker myths and explain the capabilities and benefits of this transformative technology.

Myth #1: Docker is no longer open source

Docker consists of multiple components, most of which are open source. The core Docker Engine is open source and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, so developers can continue to use and contribute to it freely. Other vital parts of the Docker ecosystem, like the Docker CLI and Docker Compose, also remain open source. This allows the community to maintain transparency, contribute improvements, and customize their container solutions.

Docker’s commitment to open source is best illustrated by the Moby Project. In 2017, Moby was spun out of the then-monolithic Docker codebase to provide a set of “building blocks” to create containerized solutions and platforms. Docker uses the Moby project for the free Docker Engine project and our commercial Docker Desktop.

Users can also find Trusted Open Source Content on Docker Hub. These Docker-Sponsored Open Source and Docker Official Images offer trusted versions of open source projects and reliable building blocks for better development.

Docker is a founder and remains a crucial contributor to the OCI, which defines container standards. This initiative ensures that Docker and other container technologies remain interoperable and maintain a commitment to open source principles.

Myth #2: Docker containers are virtual machines 

Docker containers are often mistaken for virtual machines (VMs), but the technologies operate quite differently. Unlike VMs, Docker containers don’t include an entire operating system (OS). Instead, they share the host operating system kernel, making them more lightweight and efficient. VMs require a hypervisor to create virtual hardware for the guest OS, which introduces significant overhead. Docker only packages the application and its dependencies, allowing for faster startup times and minimal performance overhead.

By utilizing the host operating system’s resources efficiently, Docker containers use fewer resources overall than VMs, which need substantial resources to run multiple operating systems concurrently. Docker’s architecture efficiently runs numerous isolated applications on a single host, optimizing infrastructure and development workflows. Understanding this distinction is crucial for maximizing Docker’s lightweight and scalable potential.

However, when running on non-Linux systems, Docker needs to emulate a Linux environment. For example, Docker Desktop uses a fully managed VM to provide a consistent experience across Windows, Mac, and Linux by running its Linux components inside this VM.

Myth #3: Docker Engine vs. Docker Desktop vs. Docker Enterprise Edition — They’re all the same

Considerable confusion surrounds the different Docker options that are available, which include:

• Mirantis Container Runtime: Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) was sold to Mirantis in 2019 and rebranded as Mirantis Container Runtime. This software, which is managed and sold by Mirantis, is designed for production container deployments and offers a lightweight alternative to existing orchestration tools.
• Docker Engine: Docker Engine is the fully open source version built from the Moby Project, providing the Docker Engine and CLI.
• Docker Desktop: Docker Desktop is a commercial offering sold by Docker that combines Docker Engine with additional features to enhance developer productivity. The Docker Business subscription includes advanced security and governance features for enterprises.

All of these variants are OCI-compliant, differing mainly in features and experiences. Docker Engine caters to the open source community, Docker Desktop elevates developer workflows with a comprehensive suite of tools for building and scaling applications, and Mirantis Container Runtime provides a specialized solution for enterprise production environments with advanced management and support. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for selecting the appropriate Docker variant to meet specific project requirements and organizational goals.

Myth #4: Docker is the same thing as Kubernetes

This myth arises from the fact that both Docker and Kubernetes are associated with containerized environments. Although they are both key players in the container ecosystem, they serve different roles.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an orchestration system for managing container instances at scale. This container orchestration tool automates the deployment, scaling, and operations of multiple containers across clusters of hosts. Other orchestration technologies include Nomad, serverless frameworks, Docker’s Swarm mode, and Apache Mesos. Each offers different features for managing containerized workloads.

Docker is primarily a platform for developing, shipping, and running containerized applications. It focuses on packaging applications and their dependencies in a portable container and is often used for local development where scaling is not required. Docker Desktop includes Docker Compose, which is designed to orchestrate multi-container deployments locally

In many organizations, Docker is used to develop applications, and the resulting Docker images are then deployed to Kubernetes for production. To support this workflow, Docker Desktop includes an embedded Kubernetes installation and the Compose Bridge tool for translating Compose format into Kubernetes-friendly code.

Myth #5: Docker is not secure

The belief that Docker is not secure is often a result of misunderstandings around how security is implemented within Docker. To help reduce security vulnerabilities and minimize the attack surface, Docker offers the following measures:

Opt-in security configuration 

Except for a few components, Docker operates on an opt-in basis for security. This approach removes friction for new users, but means Docker can still be configured to be more secure for enterprise considerations and for security-conscious users with sensitive data.

“Rootless” mode capabilities 

Docker Engine can run in rootless mode, where the Docker daemon runs without root permissions. This capability reduces the potential blast radius of malicious code escaping a container and gaining root permissions on the host. Docker Desktop takes security further by offering Enhanced Container Isolation (ECI), which provides advanced isolation features beyond what rootless mode can offer.

Built-in security features

Additionally, Docker security includes built-in features such as namespaces, control groups (cgroups), and seccomp profiles that provide isolation and limit the capabilities of containers.

SOC 2 Type 2 Attestation and ISO 27001 Certification

It’s important to note that, as an open source tool, Docker Engine is not in scope for SOC 2 Type 2 Attestation or ISO 27001 Certification. These certifications pertain to Docker, Inc.’s paid products, which offer additional enterprise-grade security and compliance features. These paid features, outlined in a Docker security blog post, focus on enhancing security and simplifying compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and other standards.  

Along with these security measures, Docker also provides best practices in the Docker documentation and training materials to help users learn how to secure their containers effectively. Recognizing and implementing these features reduces security risks and ensures that Docker can be a secure platform for containerized applications.

Myth #6: Docker is dead

This myth stems from the rapid growth and changes within the container ecosystem over the past decade. To keep pace with these changes, Docker is actively developed and is also widely adopted. In fact, the Stack Overflow community chose Docker as the most-used and most-desired developer tool in the 2024 Developer Survey for the second year in a row and recognized it as the most-admired developer tool. 

Docker Hub is one of the world’s largest repositories of container images. According to the 2024 Docker State of Application Development Report, tools like Docker Desktop, Docker Scout, Docker Build Cloud, and Docker Debug are integral to more than two-thirds of container development workflows. And, as a founding member of the OCI and steward of the Moby project, Docker continues to play a guiding role in containerization.

In the automation space, Docker is crucial for building OCI images and creating lightweight runners for build queues. With the rise of data science and AI/ML, Docker images facilitate the exchange of models, notebooks, and applications, supported by GPU workload capabilities in Docker Desktop. Additionally, Docker is widely used for quickly and cost-effectively mocking up test scenarios as an alternative to deploying actual hardware or VMs.

Myth #7: Docker is hard to learn

The belief that Docker is difficult to learn often comes from the perceived complexity of container concepts and Docker’s many features. However, Docker is a foundational technology used by more than 20 million developers worldwide, and countless resources are available to make learning Docker accessible.

Docker, Inc. is committed to the developer experience, creating intuitive and user-friendly product design for Docker Desktop and supporting products. Documentation, workshops, training, and examples are accessible through Docker Desktop, the Docker website and blog, and the Docker Navigator newsletter. Additionally, the Docker documentation site offers comprehensive guides and learning paths, and Udemy courses co-produced with Docker help new users understand containerization and Docker usage.

The thriving Docker community also contributes a wealth of content and resources, including video tutorials, how-tos, and in-person talks.

Myth #8: Docker and container technology are only for developers

The idea that Docker is only for developers is a common misconception. Docker and containers are used across various fields beyond development. Docker Desktop’s ability to run containerized workloads on Windows, macOS, or Linux requires minimal technical knowledge from users. Its integration features — synchronized host filesystems, network proxy support, air-gapped containers, and resource controls — ensure administrators can enforce governance and security.

• Data science: Docker provides consistent environments, enabling data scientists to share models, datasets, and development setups seamlessly.
• Healthcare: Docker deploys scalable applications for managing patient data and running simulations, such as medical imaging software across different hospital systems.
• Education: Educators and students use Docker to create reproducible research environments, which facilitate collaboration and simplify coding project setups.

Docker’s versatility extends beyond development, providing consistent, scalable, and secure environments for various applications.

Myth #9: Docker Desktop is just a GUI

The myth that Docker Desktop is merely a graphical user interface (GUI) overlooks its extensive features designed to enhance developer experience, streamline container management, and accelerate productivity, such as:

Cross-platform support

Docker is Linux-based, but most developer workstations run Windows or macOS. Docker Desktop enables these platforms to run Docker tooling inside a fully managed VM integrated with the host system’s networking, filesystem, and resources.

Developer tools

Docker Desktop includes built-in Kubernetes, Docker Scout for supply chain management, Docker Build Cloud for faster builds, and Docker Debug for container debugging.

Security and governance

For administrators, Docker Desktop offers Registry Access Management and Image Access Management, Enhanced Container Isolation, single sign-on (SSO) for authorization, and Settings Management, making it an essential tool for enterprise deployment and management.

Myth #10: Docker containers are for microservices only

Although Docker containers are popular for microservices architectures, they can be used for any type of application. For example, monolithic applications can be containerized, allowing them and their dependencies to be isolated into a versioned image that can run across different environments. This approach enables gradual refactoring into microservices if desired.

Additionally, Docker is excellent for rapid prototyping, allowing quick deployment of minimum viable products (MVPs). Containerized prototypes are easier to manage and refactor compared to those deployed on VMs or bare metal.

Now you know

Now that you have the facts, it’s clear that adopting Docker can significantly enhance productivity, scalability, and security for a variety of use cases. Docker’s versatility, combined with extensive learning resources and robust security features, makes it an indispensable tool in modern software development and deployment. Adopting Docker and its true capabilities can significantly enhance productivity, scalability, and security for your use case.

For more detailed insights, refer to the 2024 Docker State of Application Development Report or dive into Docker Desktop now to start your Docker journey today. 

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Docker is known worldwide as a popular application containerization platform. But it also has a lesser-known and intriguing alter ego. It’s a popular go-to platform among web developers for its speed, flexibility, broad user base, and collaborative capabilities. 

Docker has been growing as a modern solution that brings innovation to web development using containerization. With containers, developers and web development projects can become more efficient, save time, and drive fresh creativity. Web developers use Docker for development because it ensures consistency across different environments, eliminating the “it works on my machine” problem. Docker also simplifies dependency management, enhances resource efficiency, supports scalable microservices architectures, and allows for rapid deployment and rollback, making it an indispensable tool for modern web development projects.

In this post, we dive into the benefits of using Docker in businesses from small to large, and review Docker’s broad capabilities, strengths, and features for bolstering web development and developer productivity. 

What is Docker?

Docker is secure, out-of-the-box containerization software offering developers and teams a robust, hybrid toolkit to develop, test, monitor, ship, deploy, and run enterprise and web applications. Containerization lets developers separate their applications from infrastructure so they can run them without worrying about what is installed on the host, giving development teams flexibility and collaborative advantages over virtual machines, while delivering better source code faster. 

The Docker suite enables developers to package and run their application code in lightweight, local, standardized containers that have everything needed to run the application — including an operating system and required services. Docker allows developers to run many containers simultaneously on a host, while also allowing the containers to be shared with others. By working within this collaborative workspace, productive and direct communications can thrive and development processes become easier, more accurate, and more secure. Many of the components in Docker are open source, including Docker Compose, BuildKit, the Docker command-line interface (Docker CLI), containerd, and more. 

As the #1 containerization software for developers and teams, Docker is well-suited for all flavors of development. Highlights include: 

• Docker Hub: The world’s largest repository of container images, which helps developers and open source contributors find, use, and share their Docker-inspired container images.
• Docker Compose: A tool for defining and running multi-container applications.
• Docker Engine: An open source containerization technology for building and containerizing applications.
• Docker Desktop: Includes the Docker Engine and other open source components; proprietary components; and features such as an intuitive GUI, synchronized file shares, access to cloud resources, debugging features, native host integration, governance, and security features that support Enhanced Container Isolation (ECI), air-gapped containers, and administrative settings management.
• Docker Build Cloud: A Docker service that lets developers build their container images on a cloud infrastructure that ensures fast builds anywhere for all team members. 

What is a container?

Containers are lightweight, standalone, executable packages of software that include everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, libraries, environment variables, and configuration files. Containers are isolated from each other and can be connected to networks or storage and can be used to create new images based on their current states. 

Docker containers are faster and more efficient for software creation than virtualization, which uses a resource-heavy software abstraction layer on top of computer hardware. Additionally, Docker containers require fewer physical hardware resources than virtual machines and communicate with their host systems through well-defined channels.

Why use Docker for web applications?

Docker is a popular choice for developers building enterprise applications for various reasons, including consistent environments, efficient resource usage, speed, container isolation, scalability, flexibility, and portability. And, Docker is popular for web development for these same reasons. 

Consistent environments

Using Docker containers, web developers can build web applications that provide consistent environments from their development all the way through to production. By including all the components needed to run an application within an isolated container, Docker addresses those issues by allowing developers to produce and package their containers and then run them through various development, testing, and production environments to ensure their quality, security, and performance. This approach helps developers prevent the common and frustrating “but it works on my machine” conundrum, assuring that the code will run and perform well anywhere, from development through deployment.

Efficiency in using resources

With its lightweight architecture, Docker uses system resources more efficiently than virtual machines, allowing developers to run more applications on the same hardware. Docker containers allow multiple containers to run on a single host and gain resource efficiency due to the isolation and allocation features that containers incorporate. Additionally, containers require less memory and disk space to perform their tasks, saving on hardware costs and making resource management easier. Docker also saves development time by allowing container images to be reused as needed. 

Speed

Docker’s design and components also give developers significant speed advantages in setting up and tearing down container environments, allowing needed processes to be completed in seconds due to its lightweight and flexible application architecture. This allows developers to rapidly iterate their containerized applications, increasing their productivity for writing, building, testing, monitoring, and deploying their creations.  

Isolation

Docker’s application isolation capabilities provide huge benefits for developers, allowing them to write code and build their containers and applications simultaneously, with changes made in one not affecting the others. For developers, these capabilities allow them to find and isolate any bad code before using it elsewhere, improving security and manageability.

Scalability, flexibility, and portability

Docker’s flexible platform design also gives developers broad capabilities to easily scale applications up or down based on demand, while also allowing them to be deployed across different servers. These features give developers the ability to manage different workloads and system resources as needed. And, its portability features mean that developers can create their applications once and then use them in any environment, further ensuring their reliability and proper operation through the development cycle to production.

How web developers use Docker

There is a wide range of Docker use cases for today’s web developers, including its flexibility as a local development environment that can be quickly set up to match desired production environments; as an important partner for microservices architectures, where each service can be developed, tested, and deployed independently; or as an integral component in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for automated testing and deployment.

Other important Docker use cases include the availability of a strong and knowledgeable user community to help drive developer experiences and skills around containerization; its importance and suitability for vital cross-platform production and testing; and deep resources and availability for container images that are usable for a wide range of application needs. 

Get started with Docker for web development (in 6 steps)

So, you want to get a Docker container up and running quickly? Let’s dive in using the Docker Desktop GUI. In this example, we will use the Docker version for Microsoft Windows, but there are also Docker versions for use on Mac and many flavors of Linux. 

Step 1: Install Docker Desktop

Start by downloading the installer from the docs or from the release notes.

Double-click Docker Desktop for Windows Installer.exe to run the installer. By default, Docker Desktop is installed at C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker.

When prompted, be sure to choose the WSL 2 option instead of the Hyper-V option on the configuration page, depending on your choice of backend. If your system only supports one of the two options, you will not be able to select which backend to use.

Follow the instructions on the installation wizard to authorize the installer and proceed with the installation. When the installation is successful, select Close to complete the installation process.

Step 2: Create a Dockerfile

A Dockerfile is a text-based file that contains a running script of instructions giving full details on how a developer wants to build their Docker container image. A Dockerfile, which uses no file extension, is built by creating a file named Dockerfile in the getting-started-app directory, which is also where the package.json file is found. 

A Dockerfile contains details about the container’s operating system, file locations, environment, dependencies, configuration, and more. Check out the useful Docker best practices documentation for creating quality Dockerfiles. 

Here is a basic Dockerfile example for setting up an Apache web server. 

Create a Dockerfile in your project:

FROM httpd:2.4
COPY ./public-html/ /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/

Next, run the commands to build and run the Docker image:

$ docker build -t my-apache2
$ docker run -dit --name my-running-app -p 8080:80 my-apache2

Visit http://localhost:8080 to see it working.

Step 3: Build your Docker image

The Dockerfile that was just created allows us to start building our first Docker container image. The docker build command initiated in the previous step started the new Docker image using the Dockerfile and related “context,” which is the set of files located in the specified PATH or URL. The build process can refer to any of the files in the context. Docker images begin with a base image that must be downloaded from a repository to start a new image project.

Step 4: Run your Docker container

To run a new container, start with the docker run command, which runs a command in a new container. The command pulls an image if needed and then starts the container. By default, when you create or run a container using docker create or docker run, the container does not expose any of its ports to the outside world. To make a port available to services outside of Docker you must use the --publish or -p flag commands. This creates a firewall rule in the host, mapping a container port to a port on the Docker host to the outside world. 

Step 5: Access your web application

How to access a web application that is running inside a Docker container.

To access a web application running inside a Docker container, you need to publish the container’s port to the host. This can be done using the docker run command with the --publish or -p flag. The format of the --publish command is [host_port]:[container_port].

Here is an example of how to run a container and publish its port using the Docker CLI:

$ docker run -d -p 8080:80 docker/welcome-to-docker

In this command, the first 8080 refers to the host port. This is the port on your local machine that will be used to access the application running inside the container. The second 80 refers to the container port. This is the port that the application inside the container listens on for incoming connections. Hence, the command binds to port 8080 of the host to port 80 on the container system.

After running the container with the published port, you can access the web application by opening a web browser and visiting http://localhost:8080.

You can also use Docker Compose to run the container and publish its port. Here is an example of a compose.yaml file that does this:

services:
 app:
   image: docker/welcome-to-docker
   ports:
     - 8080:80

After creating this file, you can start the application with the docker compose up command. Then, you can access the web application at http://localhost:8080.

Step 6: Make changes and update

Updating a Docker application in a container requires several steps. With the command-line interface use the docker stop command to stop the container, then the existing container can be removed by using the docker rm (remove) command. Next, a new updated container can be started by using a new docker run command with the updated container. The old container must be stopped before replacing it because the old container is already using the host’s port 3000. Only one process on the machine — including containers — can listen to a specific port at a time. Only after the old container is stopped can it be removed and replaced with a new one. 

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned about how Docker brings valuable benefits to web developers to speed up and improve their operations and creativity, and we touched on how web developers can get started with the platform on Day One, including basic instructions on setting up Docker quickly to start using it for web development.

Docker delivers streamlined workflows for web development due to its lightweight architecture and broad collaboration, application design, scalability, and other benefits. Docker expands the capabilities of web application developers, giving them flexible tools for everything from building better code to testing, monitoring, and deploying reliable code more quickly. 

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date about Docker and its latest uses and innovations. 

Learn more

• Subscribe to the Docker Newsletter. 
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• Continue learning with Docker training. 
• Visit Docker Resources to explore more materials.
• Check out our documentation guides. 
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.