Reflection on Journey

Congratulations! 🎊 You have made it to the end.

What we learned

We started with the basics: what are containers and images? We saw how Docker provides packaging (images), delivery (automatic pulling of images), and an execution runtime (containers). We learned how these fundamental pieces provide a new way of thinking about software delivery.

The rest of the course has been an extended tutorial, guiding you through the process of creating, developing, and deploying a fully-featured Rails app with Docker. We generated the Rails app using a container, and we created a custom image for running our Rails app, which we gradually enhanced.

We introduced Docker Compose, using it to build up to a multiservice application with Redis, a database with decoupled volume for its data. We made our Dockerized setup play nice with JavaScript, as we saw how to work with both the standard asset pipeline and webpacker, Rails’ newest approach for integrating modern JavaScript front ends.

We also covered how to test our app, going as far as running end-to-end tests relying on JavaScript in Chrome in both headless and non-headless mode.