It’s become second nature for developers to use Virtual Machines to configure and manage their working environments. Most professionals who use VMs use Vagrant for dealing with their development environments. In this article, we’ll be moving from Vagrant to Docker, and use a small Laravel application to test that everything is working as expected.

Installation

The installation page contains instructions for almost every popular platform. Docker runs natively on Linux OS, but we can use it on Windows and Mac OS by installing the Docker Toolbox utility. If you run into some problems, you can visit this article which highlights the most common issues. You can verify it’s installed and working by running the following command in your terminal.

docker -v

# output
Docker version 1.8.1, build d12ea79

Docker Machines

A Docker machine is the VM that holds your images and containers (more on those later). Let’s create our first VM.

docker-machine create --driver virtualbox docker-vm

You can change the driver option depending on your preference. See here for the list of available drivers.

You can print the machine’s configuration by running the docker-machine env docker-vm command. This is how you can switch between machines.

Continue reading %Docker and Dockerfiles Made Easy!%

Source: SitePoint