mages, Containers, and Tags! Oh My! **Docker** is the new hotness in the software world. Dockerize all of the things! For my tastes, [Docker](https://docs.docker.com) is really more of an operations tool for packaging and deploying self contained apps. However, it is making its way into the development circles. I have been finding that, sometimes, developers have a hard time understanding all of the pieces and how the fit together. They tend to copy and paste commands from docs and tutorials and pray to the gods that there app is running. Confusion between containers, and images, building and running and what tags are just has them typing themselves in circles. But fear **not**! There is a

f you haven't jumped onto the docker bandwagon just yet, you are missing the boat. It has quickly become the de facto way for building, and deploying applications of all types and sizes. And it should be. It's easy to learn and makes deploying and scaling applications significantly easier. Linux containers are lightweight, start up very quickly, and are "throw away" resources. Most of all, Node.js applications are a breeze to get running containers

Set Up An App

The most common, and easiest way to create Docker images, is to use Dockerfiles. Much like a Makefile, Rakefile, Jakefile, etc, A Docker file is a simple set of instructions that is used to create the base image for you

ately I have been using [Docker](http://docker.com) for development. It makes it really easy to stand up services and package entire stacks for projects. Most recently, I set up an elastic search instance, and the first thing I wanted to do was install the insanely helpful [Head](http://mobz.github.io/elasticsearch-head) and [Big Desk](http://bigdesk.org/) plugins. The official [elastic search Dockerfile](https://github.com/dockerfile/elasticsearch) is just elastic search, no plugins. And of course, containers are pretty much a black box. Every time it restart, everything is back to square one. Luckily, The image exposes a volume for persistent data, and that is all we really need to have to install plugins. Here