Containerize a C++ application

Prerequisites

• You have a Git client. The examples in this section use a command-line based Git client, but you can use any client.

Overview

This section walks you through containerizing and running a C++ application.

Get the sample application

Clone the sample application to use with this guide. Open a terminal, change directory to a directory that you want to work in, and run the following command to clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/dockersamples/c-plus-plus-docker.git

You should now have the following contents in your c-plus-plus-docker directory.

├── c-plus-plus-docker/
│ ├── compose.yml
│ ├── Dockerfile
│ ├── LICENSE
│ ├── ok_api.cpp
│ └── README.md

To learn more about the files in the repository, see the following:

• Dockerfile
• .dockerignore
• compose.yml

Run the application

Inside the c-plus-plus-docker directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:8080. You will see a message {"Status" : "OK"} in the browser.

In the terminal, press ctrl+c to stop the application.

Run the application in the background

You can run the application detached from the terminal by adding the -d option. Inside the c-plus-plus-docker directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build -d

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:8080.

In the terminal, run the following command to stop the application.

$ docker compose down

For more information about Compose commands, see the Compose CLI reference.

Summary

In this section, you learned how you can containerize and run your C++ application using Docker.

Related information:

• Build with Docker guide
• Docker Compose overview

Next steps

In the next section, you'll learn how you can develop your application using containers.