Dockerize Meteor Application

January 20, 2017
docker, docker-compose, meteor

Let’s start with building our meteor project to make it ready for the production environment. Create a file build-docker.sh in the project’s root directory.

#!/bin/sh
set -e

# meteor doesn't want the build directory to be present under the root folder
meteor build --architecture=os.linux.x86_64 ../build

cd ../build && tar -zxvf <project_name>.tar.gz && cd -
docker build -t <username>/<image_name> .
  • meteor build will output <project_name>.tar.gz file into the directory build in the project’s parent directory.
  • tar will unzip the archive and extract out the bundle directory. We need to add this bundle directory to the docker image.
  • docker build will try to create a docker project using the project directory as the context. So we need to add Dockerfile to the project directory.
FROM node:7.4.0

COPY ../build/bundle /app
RUN cd /app/programs/server && npm install
ENV PORT=80
EXPOSE 80

CMD node /app/main.js
  • COPY will add the bundle folder to the docker image under /app directory.
  • RUN will install the required npm dependencies.
  • ENV will set the port the server listens to inside the container.
  • EXPOSE will make this port available to be linked outside the container.
  • CMD will start our server when docker container of this image is run.

Running the build-docker.sh script will create the docker image. If you are using this locally, you can use docker-compose to easily link the application to a containerized database.

version: '2'

services:
  mongo:
    image: mongo:3.4.0
    ports:
      - "27030:27017"
    volumes:
      - $HOME/Data/mongodb:/data/db
    command: mongod --smallfiles

  web:
    image: <username>/<image_name>
    ports:
      - "8001:80"
    environment:
      - MONGO_URL=mongodb://mongo:27017/tasks
      - ROOT_URL=http://appname.local
  1. Database(mongo)
  • We are exposing the database on port 27030 to the host machine
  • $HOME/Data/mongodb is mounted on /data/db to persist the data on host machine
  1. Application(web)
  • We are exposing our application on port 8081 of local machine
  • MONGO_URL is set to connect to mongo service via docker network on port 27017. This is the port that mongodb listens to internally.
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