Express app with nodemon development server

Use nodemon's legacy mode to monitor file changes in your container. The app will restart, if you change any .js, .json or .hjs file.

Prerequisites

Install Docker on your system.

Install instructions for Mac OS X
Install instructions for Ubuntu Linux
Install instructions for other platforms

Install Docker Compose on your system.

Python/pip: sudo pip install -U docker-compose
Other: curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.1.0/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Setup

Run docker-compose build. It will

install nodemon globally in your container
install all dependencies from the package.json locally
expose port 3000 to the host
instruct the container to execute npm start on start up.

Start

Run docker-compose up to create and start the container. The app should then be running on your docker daemon on port 3030 (On OS X you can use boot2docker ip to find out the IP address).

Notes on boot2docker

It appears that boot2docker (OS X, Windows) currently does not automatically sync the system clock with the host system after a host resumes from sleep. This becomes a problem due to the way nodemon detects file changes. That might cause it to go bananas, if the clocks on both systems are "too much" out of sync. Until this is fixed, you might use this workaround or simply do a manual sync via

/usr/local/bin/boot2docker ssh sudo ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org