Dockerizing NestJS

• #NestJS
• #docker

Dockerizing NestJS

To run an existing Nest project on Docker, you need to create a Docker image.

First, you need to install Docker. On Linux-based systems, installing the Docker Engine includes Docker.

If you are on Windows or Mac, you can install Docker Desktop to easily manage Docker in a GUI environment.

After installing Docker, navigate to the root folder of the project you want to dockerize and create the Docker configuration files.

• DockerFile: Configuration file for the Docker image
• .dockerignore: List of files to exclude from the image

In the .dockerignore file, exclude git-related files, environment variable files, node_modules, and the Dockerfile itself.

I configured my Dockerfile as follows:

FROM node:20-alpine
RUN mkdir -p /var/app
WORKDIR /var/app
COPY . .
RUN npm install
RUN npm run build
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["npm","start"]

To briefly explain the process:

1. Use the node-20-alpine (minimized version).
2. Create a folder named /var/app and copy the contents of the current root folder into it.
3. Then run npm install to install the specified dependencies and build the project.
4. Set the port that the Docker container will use to 3000.
5. Start the server.

Now, let's build the Docker image.

docker build -t (image-name) .

Once the build is complete, you can check the Docker images stored locally with the following command:

docker images

To run this Docker image in a container, you can execute the following command.

(Here, we connected port 3000 of the host to port 3000 of the container.)

docker run -p 3000:3000 (docker-image-ID)

There are various other commands available, so feel free to apply them as needed.