What it is
Docker is WebGrow24's default containerisation tool for packaging, shipping, and running applications across environments. We write Dockerfiles for every backend service, and we use Docker Compose for local development environments that match production as closely as possible. The container model solves the classic works-on-my-machine problem that plagues Indian SMB teams where developers run different host OS versions or have mismatched local toolchains. A containerised build pipeline means the build artefact is identical from CI through staging to production, which matters when a client is reviewing a staging demo before approving a production release. We use multi-stage Dockerfiles to keep production images lean, separating the dependency installation step from the build step so that only the final layer gets pushed to the registry on code changes. For Node.js apps, we use the distroless or alpine base images to reduce attack surface. We avoid Docker for static marketing sites where a CDN-served S3 bucket is simpler and cheaper, and for pure serverless architectures where the cloud provider manages the runtime entirely. Indian hosting realities shape our container choices: budget cloud VMs with limited RAM make large base images problematic, so we optimise for small image sizes using BuildKit cache mounts and layer sequencing that maximises the Docker build cache hit rate.
Use cases
- Application packaging for consistent deployments
- Local development environments matching production
- CI/CD pipelines with containerised build steps
- Microservices with isolated per-service containers
- Database and cache services with pinned versions
- Isolated testing environments per feature branch
- Self-hosted PaaS deployments via Dokploy
Integration patterns
Common integrations WebGrow24 connects with Docker:
- Docker Compose (multi-container orchestration)
- Docker BuildKit (optimised image builds)
- Dokploy (self-hosted PaaS for container management)
- GitHub Actions (container build and push)
- AWS ECR (container registry)
- Watchtower (automatic container updates)
- Portainer (container management UI)
- Snyk (container vulnerability scanning)
- Trivy (image security scanning)
- Kubernetes (container orchestration at scale)