Lesson 4: Docker Containers: Your Lothlórien Haven

[CFL2M] Docker: The CF Developer's Magic Wand

*Note: You're reading a lesson from our ColdFusion Legacy 2 Modernization E-Course [CFL2M]. Interested in getting the full course? Click here to sign up.

Last lesson, I talked about the main cause for bugs - environment differences between dev, QA, and prod servers. This lesson will teach you how to use Docker to solve this problem. 

If you stop doing things manually, you can get all your environments to be the same. 

[If you read the last email and downloaded Docker already, well done! If you haven’t yet, please do it now.]

Does your development environment match your staging server and match your production server (it should)? Getting these all to match manually can be harder than mastering the Elvish language overnight.

• If you use Docker containers, doing this becomes easy and certain.

The power of using a tool like Docker works wonders when you apply version control to the simple text configuration files that define your Docker container. 

Then, you can use CommandBox to spin up ACF or Lucee containers in seconds. 

Any other CF developer on your team can get an identical virtual machine up and running instantly!

Aragorn Action Step: Download CommandBox (there is no installation!). Experiment using it to spin up your favorite flavor of CF. eg start cfengine=adobe@2023

Even if you read this email and don’t act on it, let me put a Mordor bug in your ear about the importance of Docker+CommandBox. It’s a game-changer. It eliminates the risk of having differences between the environments! 

This is ColdFusion magic that Gandalf the wizard would be proud of. 

The next email you receive will teach you how to track who changed what lines of code and when, roll back bad changes, and more. 

-Michaela Light, CEO TeraTech

PS DIY doesn’t work for everyone. If you have a legacy CF app that needs modernizing and going at it alone seems too much, we can take care of it for you. Please click here for help.