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Docker and Node.js Best Practices
Environment Variables
Run with NODE_ENV
set to production
. This is the way you would pass in secrets and other runtime configurations to your application as well.
-e "NODE_ENV=production"
Non-root User
By default, Docker runs container as root which inside of the container can pose as a security issue. You would want to run the container as an unprivileged user wherever possible. This is however not supported out of the box with the node
Docker image.
FROM node:4.1.2
# Add our user and group first to make sure their IDs get assigned consistently
RUN groupadd -r app && useradd -r -g app app
This Docker Image can than be run with the app
user in the following way:
-u "app"
Memory
By default, any Docker Container may consume as much of the hardware such as CPU and RAM. If you are running multiple containers on the same host you should limit how much memory they can consume.
-m "300M" --memory-swap "1G"
CMD
When creating an image, you can bypass the package.json
's start
command and bake it directly into the image itself. This reduces the number of processes running inside of your container.
CMD ["node","index.js"]
Docker Run
Here is an example of how you would run a default Node.JS Docker Containerized application:
$ docker run \
-e "NODE_ENV=production" \
-u "app" \
-m "300M" --memory-swap "1G" \
-w "/usr/src/app" \
--name "my-nodejs-app" \
node [script]
Security
The Docker team has provided a tool to analyze your running containers for potential security issues. You can download and run this tool from here: https://github.com/docker/docker-bench-security