There are two motivations behind this post: the first is that I wanted to learn more about Docker. The second is that Bitbucket recently released a feature called Pipelines, which allows you to add continuous integration to your projects. I already had a test suite backing ProjectNom, so the idea of automating that into a CI tool was an attractive goal.

So let’s start at the beginning: Docker.

I’d already heard enough about Docker to understand the general concept. If you’re new to Docker, they have a good introduction on their website. While my end goal was to use Docker as a container for running ProjectNom tests, I also wanted to see if I could use it as a fully-functional, isolated development environment.

ProjectNom runs on a standard LAMP stack, so the first thing I did was look for an image that could get me as close to that environment as possible. Luckily, such a thing existed in the form of linode/lamp.

With the core technology in place, I just needed to hook up the site to Apache and the database to MySQL.
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