Newbie trying to set up a development environment to use docker

Hi there,

I’m a programmer who has worked with Dockers before now and recently moved into a new position that does not currently use them but are excited to adopt the technology. I’ve never had to create a docker environment from scratch before but that has now become my responsibility and I’m struggling to pull all the pieces together.

I’ve been working with tutorials and introductions for the majority of the week now and have had several minor successes. I’ve gotten a boilerplate Laravel project to serve by using a standard PHP image (php:7.1.8-apache) and have managed to set up volumes and the use of docker-compose and Dockerfile.

I’m stuck at a point where I’m trying to customise the images being used on local development to meet the actual environments on staging and production. I’ve got a Centos image and an Nginx image, with the latter serving a 502 bad gateway error. I’m so tantalisingly close, but I just cannot seem to get those lines to cross.

I’ve explored here and Stack Exchange (asking this question yesterday : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58290774/how-to-serve-site-in-one-docker-container-through-a-separate-nginx-container ) as best I can.

I think I’ve reached the point I can get without being able to ask direct questions; is this place appropriate for that? I’d like to walk through what I’ve done and see where I can both fix problems that have presented and also improve the choices I’ve made.

Finally, as I want to make this a new expertise, what base resources (books or subscriptions) are good to acquire?