Docker Development Environment

For development purposes, you may want to run the web api server as a docker container with NODE_ENV="development". This allows you to modify node/express code and have the container watch for changes to files and automatically restart the express server using nodemon. This gives you a development experience similar to what you would have if you just ran express on your native machine.

The main advantage of doing development with docker hosting the express server is that the environment will exactly replicate the production environment as far as node and npm versions and versions of all the npm packages.

This uses the docker-compose.yml docker compose script, which, in turn, uses the dockerfile.dev build instructions to build an image that is suitable for running during development. A production build uses a slimmed-down image defined in dockerfile and explained in the Deployment section`

Building a dev version of the web api server

docker-compose up