Docker Best Practices

What this best practices guide is

A practical guide to Docker best practices for developers who ship containers. It covers writing Dockerfiles that build fast and stay small, keeping images secure, passing secrets into builds safely, running containers that behave well in production, using Compose for local development and building images in CI.

It has 6 chapters and 28 practices, each with why it matters, what to do and what to avoid. For backend and full-stack developers.

Chapter by chapter

1. Writing the Dockerfile (5 practices)

How to structure a Dockerfile so the image is small and rebuilds are fast: the base image, stages, instruction order and the build context.

2. Image size and security (5 practices)

What makes an image safe to run: who the process runs as, which exact base you build on, and how you find and fix known vulnerabilities.

3. Secrets in builds (4 practices)

How to give a build a token or key it needs, such as a private registry token, without leaving it inside the image.

4. Running containers well (6 practices)

How a container should behave once it is running: one job, clean shutdowns, honest health reports, bounded resources and logs where the platform can find them.

5. Docker Compose for local development (4 practices)

How to use Compose so a new teammate can run the whole stack with one command and code changes show up without rebuilding by hand.

6. Building images in CI (4 practices)

How to build, tag, check and publish images in a pipeline so builds are fast, traceable and stop when something is wrong.

How it works on Sefism

The guide reads like a short course: a syllabus, then one chapter per page in a focused reader, with a quiz at the end of each chapter for members. The opening chapters are open to everyone. Adding it to your account uses credits, opens every chapter and keeps your progress.

Every claim is checked against the sources listed on the page (6 cited).