Local Development: Working with Docker

We've been hard at work deploying to staging and production environments, ensuring our application is stable and ready for users. Now, it's time to focus on local development and testing. This is a critical step before pushing changes to staging or production environments.

🚀 Why Local Development Matters

Developing and testing locally allows you to catch issues early, ensuring that when you push to staging or production, you're confident in the quality of your changes.

🐳 Local Development with Docker

There are several key benefits:

1. Environment Consistency: Ensures everyone has the same setup, avoiding "works on my machine" issues.
2. Isolation: Keeps dependencies isolated to prevent conflicts with other projects.
3. Quick Setup: Simplifies onboarding—developers can start with a single command (docker-compose up).
4. Dependency Management: Manages Node.js versions and dependencies easily in a Dockerfile.
5. Portability: Makes transitioning from local development to other environments (staging, production) seamless.

Especially when your development team is large, Docker is strongly recommended.

We use Docker to manage our APIs and services locally. Here's how it works:

• docker-compose.yml is the file we use for local development. It loads the Dockerfile.dev, which packages a Node.js environment. This sets up both the backend and a PostgreSQL database, linked together inside Docker containers.

🛠 Setting Up for Local Development

1. Ensure Docker is Running
   Before you start developing locally, make sure the Docker desktop app is running on your machine.

2. Create a .env file
   Set up a .env file. We'll cover this in the next chapter.