Docker Docker, Give Me The News

So, I've been working hard getting up to speed with tech necessary to handle my latest project (branding, name, etc. tbd) and have logged essentially full time work on doing such. I went through a full .NET/Blazor tutorial, creating a fairly simple but full-featured eCommerce solution, with placeholders being food items for a restaurant or something along those lines, but the use case could be whatever. Even implemented social logins and learned how to integrate with payment providers... fun stuff!

Then it was on to the next step of learning: Docker, Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, all that fun stuff. Now, the Blazor course was fascinating, but it mostly just taught me the Blazor way to do things that I already knew how to do. But Docker...

Docker is a whole different kettle of fish. I had literally no experience with containers/containerization and all that goes with it. But thanks to a great tutorial I finished today, I was able to get some basic Hello, World stuff up and running, even on a fully-functional Swarm!

But that wasn't the endgame. There *is* no endgame to development, of course, but my goal was to get Oqtane running in a Docker container. For now, just locally, and not even linked to a DB, but these are all steps toward the end goal. And...

fail.

For hours, I was beating my head against a wall, frantically googling, diving into code, and not getting anywhere. But sometimes ADHD-style hyperfocus and just general stubbornness pay off. And as I write this blog, I did it!

Locally. With no DB. But it's running!

Took me about 30 minutes of initial setup to write the Dockerfile and the compose.yml, and another five hours of troubleshooting.

My biggest problem was port-mapping: it was all over the place. The tutorials I found used old .NET standards of ports 80 and 443, whereas now it's apparently 8080 and 8081. (read the docs folks) And Oqtane is configured to run by default on port 44357 and 44358 for some reason (sometimes you have to dive into the code to find this stuff docs be damned)

But I did it. And I'm proud of my problem-solving and troubleshooting. That's one thing that I've always loved about coding: spending four hours finding a misplaced semicolon or a missing bracket *sounds* like it'd be hell, but after I solve problems like that I actually feel...how you say, accomplished. And that's one of the many ways I know coding/development is for me.

Anyway, I feel that sense of accomplishment now, so it's time to play some Mother 3 and go to bed, because tomorrow is another day of this very fun grind. If you've never played Mother 3, I highly recommend it: same goes for working in Oqtane.