Introduction
About this book
I am writing this book because I find it easier to learn new technologies if the examples are in a language which I already know. For example, learning Test Driven Development is difficult as most of the books use Java as the examples, whereas I am primarily a PHP developer.
I also prefer to learn from books, rather than videos. I think it's a shame that technical books are not as popular as they used to be, either in paper or electronic form.
This book is currently a work in progress, and therefore may contain errors or missing chapters.
This focus of this book is to teach you about how to run Docker on your local machine for development purposes. It does not currently cover the deployment of Docker in production.
Assumptions
Whilst this is an introductory book on Docker, I am making some assumptions about your knowledge, including:
- You are familiar with PHP and use it as your primary development language.
- You are comfortable with using the command line on Linux or macOS.
- You are running a recent version of Linux or macOS, released within the last 2 years.
- If you are running macOS, you have Homebrew installed.
I use the latest Ubuntu LTS (22.04) as my main development machine, and all examples are tested on that environment.
Installing Docker
There are several ways you can install Docker, and I won't repeat all the instructions here. Instead, check the Get Docker pages on the official Docker website.
If you are running Ubuntu, I strongly recommend that you run an LTS release, as the upstream repositories do not support interim releases.
Testing your installation
Once you have Docker installed, you can test it by running the 'hello world' image:
$ docker run hello-world
You should receive a message saying that your installation is working correctly.