Nestjs docker - Run nestjs in container

In this article we will convert our nestjs app into docker image with multi stage build.

Creating the Dockerfile

create a dockerfile and .dockerignore file in the root directory of your project

touch Dockerfile
touch .dockerignore

Add the following code in the .dockerignore file to prevent these files to be added in the docker build process

Dockerfile
.dockerignore
node_modules
npm-debug.log
dist

Writing Multistage Build:

Add the following code in the dockerfile to create the multistage docker build

# Base Image
FROM node:16-alpine AS development

WORKDIR /opt

COPY package*.json ./

# npm clean install
RUN npm ci

COPY . .

RUN npm run build


# production docker build
FROM node:16-alpine AS production

ENV NODE_ENV=production

WORKDIR /opt

COPY package*.json ./

# install only production node modules
RUN npm ci --omit=dev

COPY . .

COPY --from=development /opt/dist ./dist

EXPOSE 3000

CMD ["node" , "dist/main"]

Here we are using node:16-alpine as a base image so the build version will less than 512 MB in size since the base image size will 116 MB only.

Once you have completed above steps you can run the below command to create the nestjs docker image

docker build . -t <image name>

To start the nestjs app as a container, run the below command

docker run -p 3000:3000 <image-name>

Troubleshooting:

if you face any typescript error, while running the npm run build step, change the allowJs to false in tsconfig.json file.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "commonjs",
    "declaration": true,
    "removeComments": true,
    "emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "target": "es2017",
    "sourceMap": true,
    "outDir": "./dist",
    "baseUrl": "./",
    "incremental": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "strictNullChecks": false,
    "noImplicitAny": false,
    "strictBindCallApply": false,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": false,
    "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": false,
    "allowJs": false
  }
}