Summary

In this chapter, we have learned about how VirtualBox can be used to create virtual machines on your workstation and how you can use it to run Windows (or Linux or other operating systems) in a virtual machine. We also learned enough about Docker to use it to build our first application.

This chapter was written using Windows 10 running within a VirtualBox virtual machine, running on an Arch Linux host. Microsoft Word was used within Windows, while the Docker commands and scripts were run and edited on the Arch Linux host.

We demonstrated how we can build a LAMP-style application, without MySQL, and containerize it. We can mount our source code directory from the host to the container so that we can edit files and see the changes immediately in the container. We learned how to persist data, meaning that stopping and starting the container would retain important files and state.

In the next chapter, we'll explore Docker Hub and build a more complex application that requires more than one container.