Containerization¶

Why create a container?¶

Up to this point in the workshop, you've been developing an application using Node-RED on your local device.

The fact the editor and runtime are bundled together makes it very convenient to quickly start building applications.

But that model is less suitable when you think about creating applications that run in production, or that need to be distributed to remote devices. You don't want to be using the editor to edit the application directly - you want to be able to develop and test your application locally and then have a controlled way to deploy it into your production environment.

In this part of the workshop, we're going to step through the process of wrapping the application as a Docker container. Once the container has been created, it can be deployed just as you would any other container - pushing it to a cloud environment or down to edge devices.

Next Steps¶

At the start of this workshop, you enabled the Projects feature. That gave you a git repository you can use to manage your application.

In this section we are going to make some updates to the project files to help create a deployable container.

This involves:

• Updating the project's package.json file
• Adding a settings.js file
• Adding a Dockerfile
• Push updates to GitHub