Playing with Docker on Windows

This repository gathers Docker code examples coming from various websites and books. It also includes several batch files for experimenting with Docker on the Windows machine.

Ada, Akka, C++, COBOL, Dart, Deno, Erlang, Flix, Go, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, Standard ML, TruffleSqueak, WiX Toolset and Zig are other trending topics we are continuously monitoring.

☛ Read the document "What is Docker?" to know more about the Docker ecosystem.

Project dependencies ▴

• Docker Desktop 4.37 (release notes)
• Git 2.47 (release notes)

Optionally one may also install the following software:

• ConEmu (release notes)
• Visual Studio Code 1.96 (release notes)

🔎 Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run git from the command line (as well as over 250 Unix commands like awk, diff, file, grep, more, mv, rmdir, sed and wc).

For instance our development environment looks as follows (January 2025) ¹:

C:\opt\ConEmu\             ( 26 MB)
C:\opt\Git\                (393 MB)
C:\opt\VSCode\             (389 MB)
C:\Program Files\Docker\   (2.7 GB)

Directory structure ▴

This project is organized as follows:

bin\
docs\
examples\{README.md}
README.md
RESOURCES.md
setenv.bat

where

• directory bin\ provides several utility batch files.
• directory docs\ contains Docker related papers/articles.
• directory examples\ contains Docker code examples grabbed from various websites.
• file README.md is the Markdown document for this page.
• file RESOURCES.md gathers Docker related informations.
• file setenv.bat is the batch script for setting up our environment.

We also define a virtual drive – e.g. drive O: – in our working environment in order to reduce/hide the real path of our project directory (see article "Windows command prompt limitation" from Microsoft Support).

🔎 We use the Windows external command subst to create virtual drives; for instance:

> subst O: %USERPROFILE%\workspace\docker-examples

In the next section we give a brief description of the batch files present in this project.

Batch commands ▴

setenv.bat

We execute command setenv.bat once to setup our development environment; it makes external tools such as docker.exe, git.exe, and sh.exe directly available from the command prompt.

> setenv -verbose
Tool versions:
   docker 26.1.1, kubectl v1.29.2,
   git 2.47.1.windows.1, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1)-release
Tool paths:
   C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker\resources\bin\docker.exe
   C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker\resources\bin\kubectl.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\diff.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\bash.exe
Environment variables:
   "DOCKER_HOME=C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker\"
   "GIT_HOME=C:\opt\Git"
Path associations:
   O:\: => C:\Users\michelou\workspace-perso\docker-examples\

> where docker git sh
C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker\resources\bin\docker
C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker\resources\bin\docker.exe
C:\opt\deno\deno.exe
C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
C:\opt\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe
C:\opt\Git\bin\sh.exe
C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\sh.exe

Footnotes

[1] Downloads ↩

In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):

ConEmuPack.230724.7z              (  5 MB)
Docker Desktop Installer.exe      (481 MB)
PortableGit-2.47.1-64-bit.7z.exe  ( 41 MB)

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mics/January 2025 ▲