docker-node-onbuild

Dockerfile repo for nodeJS onbuild docker container. Based on a basic node environment with a volume compatible onbuild step

Available from the the docker hub regsitry as grahamgilchrist\node-onbuild

Background

The default official NodeJS docker hub repo offers an 'onbuild' option, which copies and installs packages from a package.json folder in the project.

This works great with containers which are meant to be built once, but for development work, we frequently want to mount a project directory as a volume inside our docker container to allow us to instantly see modifications to the source code without rebuilding. Sadly this isn't possible with the official docker hub repo, as mounting the project directory to /usr/src/app will overwrite the node_modules directory from the build step.

This container image solves that by installing all node_modules into a directory one level above the mounted folder, since node will recursively check up the directory tree for modules. The modules are thus still entirely contained inside the docker container and not the mounted directory. This also has the side benefit that node modules can also be temporarily loaded into the node_modules directory of the mounted folder for quick testing, as they will take priority over those one directory up inside the container.

Repo structure is based on the same version folder convention as official docker hub repos (e.g. python: https://github.com/docker-library/python)

Usage

• Mount a directory with a package.json file and anything else you want to be available (e.g. node project files) to /usr/src/app
• The docker build step will copy package.json into the container and install the packages one directory above the project
• docker run -v ./:/usr/src/app grahamgilchrist/node-onbuild:0.12 node-command

Use with docker compose:

docker-compose.yaml:

node:
  image: grahamgilchrist/node-onbuild:0.12
  volumes:
    - ./:/usr/src/app

• docker-compose run node node-command