Let’s start this with a short story. When I was doing B. Tech., I started a startup where I developed the complete software by myself. I had knowledge only about some programming languages, databases, SQL. With help of Seniors in college, I got knowledge about GitHub, LAMP, GoDaddy, Digital Ocean. These were enough to build a web application and host it on the cloud. But there were a lot of things that we forgot about, due to which our application got a lot of issues when our startup scaled, and we reached more customers.

Some of the major issues in our project were — Scalability, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, Application Versioning.

Here we introduced Docker in our project. Docker is an open-source platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker provides the ability to package and run an application in a loosely isolated environment called a container. Containers are lightweight, and all dependencies required for the application are installed in this container which are not relied on what installed on host machine. These containers can be shared with other developers and testers.

When developers do some bug fixes or add a new feature to the application, the Docker image can be rebuilt, and a container will spin up.

Install Docker

Windows and macOS :-

Docker Desktop can be downloaded from Docker Official Website.

Linux :-

For Linux based machines, the Best way to install Docker is using CLI.

# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc

# Add the repository to Apt sources:
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

# Install Docker
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

Run first container :-

Verify and run first container using below command :-

docker run hello-world

If the above command runs successfully, you will be able to see similar output below:-

Hello-world container output

If you don’t get similar output, let me know in comments. Your queries will be resolved as soon as possible.

I hope you all were able to follow this article. Don't just read, practice it together with reading. In next article, I will add details about Docker architecture and all terminologies related to Docker.