Using private image from Google Container Registry (Docker part 1)

I was recently introduced to using Docker to containerize applications as part of a CD/CI pipeline. This will be the first part of my multipart series on using Docker, CircleCI,Google Container Registry (GCR) and other tools for this pipeline.

-- Other Parts --

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This part is sort of the last part of the pipeline. Having already uploaded the Docker image to GCR, we will be using docker-compose to load that private image from GCR to use locally.

I am developing in Windows environment, but these tools are readily available for many common operating systems.

A few tools we need for this:

1. Google Cloud SDK: You can download it here
2. Docker-Compose, which is part of the Docker package, download here

Setup:

1. After Google Cloud SDK has been installed, open up the console using windows cmd and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Cloud SDK>
2. run gcloud auth configure-docker to add the necessary configurations to access the private GCR images. The configurations will be stored in ~/.docker/config.json.

3. Set up a docker-compose.yml file in the root of your project, add the following:

   version: '3'
   services:
   frontend:
       image: gcr.io/[projectID]/[image]:latest
       command: npm start
       ports:
           - 3799:3000

This is a frontend React application, so when we pull the image down from GCR, we run npm start to run the development environment. Port 3799 is the port exposed by docker container, and port 3000 is the port this application runs on. After the image launches, you can navigate to localhost:3799 to see the site.

Note - Port 3799 is a random port I chose, you can select others

4. Run docker-compose up in the terminal, if everything is configured correctly, the image will launch.

Thanks for reading!