Share the application

Now that we’ve built an image, let’s share it! To share Docker images, you have to use a Docker registry. The default registry is Docker Hub and is where all of the images we’ve used have come from.

Docker ID

A Docker ID allows you to access Docker Hub which is the world’s largest library and community for container images. Create a Docker ID for free if you don’t have one.

Create a repo

To push an image, we first need to create a repository on Docker Hub.

1. Sign up or Sign in to Docker Hub.

2. Click the Create Repository button.

3. For the repo name, use getting-started. Make sure the Visibility is Public.

   Private repositories

   Did you know that Docker offers private repositories which allows you to restrict content to specific users or teams? Check out the details on the Docker pricing page.

4. Click the Create button!

If you look at the image below an example Docker command can be seen. This command will push to this repo.

Push the image

1. In the command line, try running the push command you see on Docker Hub. Note that your command will be using your namespace, not “docker”.

    $ docker push docker/getting-started
    The push refers to repository [docker.io/docker/getting-started]
    An image does not exist locally with the tag: docker/getting-started
   

   Why did it fail? The push command was looking for an image named docker/getting-started, but didn’t find one. If you run docker image ls, you won’t see one either.

   To fix this, we need to “tag” our existing image we’ve built to give it another name.

2. Login to the Docker Hub using the command docker login -u YOUR-USER-NAME.

3. Use the docker tag command to give the getting-started image a new name. Be sure to swap out YOUR-USER-NAME with your Docker ID.

    $ docker tag getting-started YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started
   

4. Now try your push command again. If you’re copying the value from Docker Hub, you can drop the tagname portion, as we didn’t add a tag to the image name. If you don’t specify a tag, Docker will use a tag called latest.

    $ docker push YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started
   

Run the image on a new instance

Now that our image has been built and pushed into a registry, let’s try running our app on a brand new instance that has never seen this container image! To do this, we will use Play with Docker.

1. Open your browser to Play with Docker.

2. Click Login and then select docker from the drop-down list.

3. Connect with your Docker Hub account.

4. Once you’re logged in, click on the ADD NEW INSTANCE option on the left side bar. If you don’t see it, make your browser a little wider. After a few seconds, a terminal window opens in your browser.

   

5. In the terminal, start your freshly pushed app.

    $ docker run -dp 3000:3000 YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started
   

   You should see the image get pulled down and eventually start up!

6. Click on the 3000 badge when it comes up and you should see the app with your modifications! Hooray! If the 3000 badge doesn’t show up, you can click on the “Open Port” button and type in 3000.

Recap

In this section, we learned how to share our images by pushing them to a registry. We then went to a brand new instance and were able to run the freshly pushed image. This is quite common in CI pipelines, where the pipeline will create the image and push it to a registry and then the production environment can use the latest version of the image.

Now that we have that figured out, let’s circle back around to what we noticed at the end of the last section. As a reminder, we noticed that when we restarted the app, we lost all of our todo list items. That’s obviously not a great user experience, so let’s learn how we can persist the data across restarts!

get started, setup, orientation, quickstart, intro, concepts, containers, docker desktop, docker hub, sharing