This guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough for deploying SolidX applications using Docker for production.

Deploying with Docker

This guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough for deploying your SolidX application using Docker. Containerizing your application is a best practice for creating a consistent and reproducible production environment.

Mental Model

Docker is the packaging boundary for a SolidX application. Instead of relying on a manually prepared host, you define the runtime once and move that same containerized setup across environments.

Choose Docker when reproducibility matters across local, staging, and production.
- Think of images as portable runtime snapshots.
- Use Compose when you want to run the app stack as coordinated services. So the intuition is: Docker reduces environment drift by making the application runtime explicit and portable.

Before you begin, ensure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your system. You can find installation instructions on the official Docker website.

1. Dockerizing Your Application

The create-solid-app template already provides multi-stage Dockerfiles for both the backend (solid-api/Dockerfile) and frontend (solid-ui/Dockerfile) to create lean and secure production images.

2. Using Docker Compose for Production

The create-solid-app template includes a docker-compose.yml file to define and manage your multi-container application, including a database. You can find this file in the root of your generated project.

Configure Environment Variables

While the Dockerfile defines the environment inside the container, the docker-compose.yml file and the .env file are used to configure the services from the outside. This is crucial for security and portability, as it allows you to inject environment-specific variables like database credentials and API keys without hardcoding them into the Docker image.

Create a .env file in the root of your project to store your database credentials:

DB_USER=your_db_user
DB_PASSWORD=your_db_password
DB_NAME=your_db_name

Docker Compose automatically loads the .env file from the root directory and injects these variables into the containers at runtime. Remember to add .env to your .gitignore file to avoid committing sensitive information.

3. Building and Running the Containers

Now you can build and run your entire application stack with a single command.

Build and Run

docker-compose up --build -d

This command will build the images and start the containers in detached mode.

View Logs

To view the logs from your running containers:

docker-compose logs -f

4. Verifying the Deployment

Backend API

The backend API should be accessible at http://localhost:3000, and the Swagger documentation at http://localhost:3000/docs.

Frontend Application

The frontend should be running at http://localhost:3001.

5. Post-Deployment

Pushing Images to a Container Registry

To deploy your application to a cloud provider, you'll need to push your images to a container registry like Docker Hub or AWS ECR.

1. Log in to your container registry:

docker login your_registry_url

2. Tag your images:

docker-compose build
docker-compose push

You can also manually tag and push your images:

docker tag <local_image_name>:<tag> <registry_url>/<image_name>:<tag>
docker push <registry_url>/<image_name>:<tag>

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed your SolidX application with Docker.

Docker