Yesterday, my buddy Mark was like, “Hey, have you ever messed with Docker? You should try setting up a Corgi image, it’s fun!” I’d heard of Docker, you know, the thing everyone says makes deploying stuff easier, but I’d never actually gotten my hands dirty. So, I figured, why not? Corgis are cute, and this seemed like a decent excuse to finally learn something new.
First things first, I had to get Docker installed. I went to their website, follow the instructions, it’s not difficult. I am on Windows, so I downloaded Docker Desktop. Click, click, click, a few minutes of waiting, and boom, Docker was supposedly running. I typed docker --version in the command prompt, just to make sure, and yep, it spit out a version number. Cool, step one complete.
The Search for a Corgi
Next, I needed to find this “Corgi image” Mark was talking about. I had no idea what that even meant, so I just Googled “Docker Corgi image”. Turns out, there’s this thing called Docker Hub, which is like a giant library of pre-built images. Think of it like a bunch of recipes you can just download and use.
I found a few Corgi-related images, some were just pictures, some were… well, I wasn’t really sure. I ended up picking one that seemed simple enough, it was just called “corgi”. I guess less is more in the Docker world, who knew.
Making It Run
Now for the fun part – actually running this thing. Mark had mentioned something about a docker run command, so I tried that. I typed docker run corgi into the command prompt, hit enter, and… a bunch of stuff happened! Docker started downloading a whole load of files, it felt like it was building a whole operating system just for this Corgi image.
After a few minutes, the download finished, and… nothing. No Corgi on my screen, no barking, nothing. I was a little confused. I went back to the Docker Hub page for the image, and I saw some instructions about “ports”. Apparently, you have to tell Docker which ports on your computer to connect to the ports inside the container (that’s what they call the thing that runs the image). It’s like setting up a phone line between your computer and this virtual Corgi world.
So I tried again, this time with: docker run -p 8080:80 corgi. What this does, I think, is connect my computer’s port 8080 to the container’s port 80. Again, I hit enter, and… still nothing on my screen.
I was about to give up and message Mark, but then I remembered something about web servers. I figured maybe this Corgi image was actually a tiny website. So, I opened my browser and typed in localhost:8080. And there it was! A picture of a Corgi! It was just a simple webpage, with an image and some text, but hey, I made it work!
Cleaning Up
After admiring my digital Corgi for a few minutes, I figured I should probably clean things up. I didn’t want this Corgi container running forever. I learned about docker ps, which shows you all the running containers. I saw my “corgi” container listed there.
Then, I used docker stop <container ID>. I copied container ID from the list, then I stoped it. I checked again with docker ps, and it was gone. All clean!
So, that’s my first adventure with Docker. It was a bit confusing at first, but it was fun to get something working, even if it was just a picture of a Corgi. I can see how this could be useful for more complex stuff, though. Maybe next time I’ll try something a bit more ambitious, like a… I don’t know, a Golden Retriever?
