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Speed Up Your Development Flow With These Dockerfile Best Practices

The Dockerfile is the starting point for creating a Docker image. The file format provides a well-defined set of directives that allow you to copy files or folders, run commands, set environment variables, and do other tasks required to create a container image. It’s really important to craft your Dockerfile well to keep the resulting image secure, small, quick to build, and quick to update.

In this post, we’ll see how to write good Dockerfiles to speed up your development flow, ensure build reproducibility and that produce images that can be confidently deployed to production.

Note: for this blog post we’ll base our Dockerfile examples on the react-java-mysql sample from the awesome-compose repository.

Development flow

As developers, we want to match our development environment to the target production context as closely as possible to ensure that what we build will work when deployed.

We also want to be able to develop quickly which means we want builds to be fast and for us to be able to use developer tools like debuggers. Containers are a great way to codify our development environment but we need to define our Dockerfile correctly to be able to interact quickly with our containers.

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