Docker for beginners: The Shipyard

Before we begin, let’s take a few minutes to introduce this course.

I’ve been usingDocker for several years now. As you’ve seen in my various tutorials, I use it regularly in my projects. But like many people, I didn’t learn it through a structured course: I mostly learned through experience, reading, and… a lot of trial and error.

Getting started withDocker was pretty difficult for me. I had a hard time understanding how it worked and, above all, its usefulness compared to using virtual machines.

Then one day, it clicked.

I needed to run GitLab and Discourse, but I only had a single virtual machine. Both applications use a similar stack (Ruby and PostgreSQL), and running these two environments on the same VM is complicated, if not impossible, without creating numerous conflicts.

That’s whenDocker came into my life.

Thanks to this technology, I was able to deploy both applications on a single VM, in a simple and isolated manner. What surprised me most at the time was how easy it was to deploy and, above all, how fast it ran.

From there, I started doing more research: tutorials, tests, official documentation… I also looked for training courses. But most of them are paid, or only available as videos. Personally, I’ve always had a hard time learning solely through videos.

It was to avoid this difficulty that I decided to create this course.

Through this free course, we’ll exploreDocker it together, step by step.

To make things concrete and fun, we’ll use a very common example: an Apache/PHP/MariaDB stack, used by many applications such as WordPress, GLPI, and FreshRSS.

DockerThe goal isn’t just to learn, but also to understand its logic and philosophy so you can easily use it in your own projects.