This lesson's interactive features are locked, please to keep using them

Dockerizing the Server

Now that you know how to run your server manually, let's run it in Docker! The steps are simple:

Build the Server
Create a Dockerfile
Build an image using the Dockerfile (which will copy in the built server)
Run the image in a container

Assignment

Create a Dockerfile in the root of your server's repo. Let's start with a simple lightweight Debian Linux OS:

FROM debian:stable-slim

Add a COPY command on the next line of your Dockerfile. In the case of a simple compiled Go server, all we need is the compiled program itself!

# COPY source destination
COPY goserver /bin/goserver

Replace the first "goserver" with the name of your server executable if it's different.

The ADD command would also work here, but COPY is fine because we don't need the extra functionality that ADD offers.

Add a CMD command as the last line in the Dockerfile. This automatically starts the server process in the container when we run it.

CMD ["/bin/goserver"]

Build your Dockerfile into an image.

docker build . -t goserver:latest

Start a new container from the image. Be sure to forward the ports to your host machine.

docker run -p 8010:8010 goserver

If you get an exec format error, it's probably because you built the go server for your local architecture, but you're trying to run it on a Linux OS! To fix it, rebuild the binary (and then the Dockerfile) with these environment variables:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build

You should be able to access your server from the browser just like before, but this time it's running inside of Docker!

Run and submit the CLI tests.