Docker

"It works on my machine" is an expensive sentence. Docker removes it by packaging your application, its runtime and its dependencies into one image that behaves identically on a laptop, a staging server and production. We use Docker on every project we host from our Southampton studio, and we containerise existing applications for businesses that have outgrown manual deployments.

What We Do With Docker

1. Containerising Existing Applications

• 1

  Legacy app packaging

  PHP, Node, Ruby, Python and Go applications wrapped into reproducible images, including the awkward ones with undocumented server dependencies.

• 2

  Multi-stage builds

  Build tooling kept out of the final image, cutting image size, attack surface and deployment time.

• 3

  Environment parity

  Development, staging and production running the same image, so bugs stop appearing only after release.

2. Orchestration and Deployment

• 1

  Docker Compose stacks

  Application, database, worker and reverse proxy defined in one file, version-controlled alongside your code.

• 2

  Health checks and restarts

  Containers that recover from failure automatically, with sensible resource limits so one runaway process cannot take down the host.

• 3

  Registry and CI integration

  Images built and pushed by your pipeline, then rolled out on merge with no manual SSH steps.

3. Security and Maintenance

• 1

  Minimal base images

  Alpine and distroless bases where appropriate, reducing the number of packages that can carry a vulnerability.

• 2

  Non-root containers and secrets

  Applications run as unprivileged users, with credentials injected at runtime rather than baked into image layers.

• 3

  Image scanning and updates

  Regular rebuilds against patched bases so containers do not quietly rot in production.

4. Local Development That Matches Production

• 1

  One-command onboarding

  A new developer clones the repository, runs one command and has the full stack running locally.

• 2

  Database seeding

  Repeatable local data so testing does not depend on a copy of the live database.

• 3

  Handover documentation

  Written setup notes, so your team or your next agency can pick the project up without us.

Where Docker Fits In Your Project

Containerisation is included as standard in our Custom Systems builds (from £4,995) and in every managed hosting plan, including Business Site Hosting and Shop Site Hosting. For standalone containerisation of an application you already own, we quote after a short technical review.

Related work sits in our cloud services, server management and Bash and automation pages. Backend services we containerise are usually written in Go or TypeScript.