Share the application

Now that you’ve built an image, you can share it. To share Docker images, you have to use a Docker registry. The default registry is Docker Hub and is where all of the images you’ve used have come from.

Docker ID

A Docker ID allows you to access Docker Hub which is the world’s largest library and community for container images. Create a Docker ID for free if you don’t have one.

Create a repo

To push an image, you first need to create a repository on Docker Hub.

Sign up or Sign in to Docker Hub.
Select the Create Repository button.
For the repo name, use getting-started. Make sure the Visibility is Public.

Private repositories

Did you know that Docker offers private repositories which allows you to restrict content to specific users or teams? Check out the details on the Docker pricing page.
Select the Create button.

If you look at the image below an example Docker command can be seen. This command will push to this repo.

Docker command with push example

Push the image

In the command line, try running the push command you see on Docker Hub. Note that your command will be using your namespace, not “docker”.
```
 $ docker push docker/getting-started
 The push refers to repository [docker.io/docker/getting-started]
 An image does not exist locally with the tag: docker/getting-started
```
Why did it fail? The push command was looking for an image named docker/getting-started, but didn’t find one. If you run docker image ls, you won’t see one either.

To fix this, you need to “tag” your existing image you’ve built to give it another name.
Login to the Docker Hub using the command docker login -u YOUR-USER-NAME.
Use the docker tag command to give the getting-started image a new name. Be sure to swap out YOUR-USER-NAME with your Docker ID.
```
 $ docker tag getting-started YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started
```
To learn more about the docker tag command, see docker tag.
Now try your push command again. If you’re copying the value from Docker Hub, you can drop the tagname portion, as you didn’t add a tag to the image name. If you don’t specify a tag, Docker will use a tag called latest.
```
 $ docker push YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started
```

Run the image on a new instance

Now that your image has been built and pushed into a registry, try running your app on a brand new instance that has never seen this container image. To do this, you will use Play with Docker.

Note

Play with Docker uses the amd64 platform. If you are using an ARM based Mac with Apple Silicon, you will need to rebuild the image to be compatible with Play with Docker and push the new image to your repository.

To build an image for the amd64 platform, use the --platform flag.
$ docker build --platform linux/amd64 -t YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started .
Docker buildx also supports building multi-platform images. To learn more, see Mult-platform images.

Open your browser to Play with Docker.
Select Login and then select docker from the drop-down list.
Connect with your Docker Hub account.
Once you’re logged in, select the ADD NEW INSTANCE option on the left side bar. If you don’t see it, make your browser a little wider. After a few seconds, a terminal window opens in your browser.
In the terminal, start your freshly pushed app.
```
 $ docker run -dp 3000:3000 YOUR-USER-NAME/getting-started
```
You should see the image get pulled down and eventually start up.
Select on the 3000 badge when it comes up and you should see the app with your modifications. If the 3000 badge doesn’t show up, you can select on the Open Port button and type in 3000.

Next steps

In this section, you learned how to share your images by pushing them to a registry. You then went to a brand new instance and were able to run the freshly pushed image. This is quite common in CI pipelines, where the pipeline will create the image and push it to a registry and then the production environment can use the latest version of the image.

Now you can circle back around to what you noticed at the end of the last section. As a reminder, you noticed that when you restarted the app, you lost all of your todo list items. That’s obviously not a great user experience, so next you’ll learn how you can persist the data across restarts.

Persist the DB