Docker: Get Started Guide

Containers are one of those topics where the concept is simpler than the explanations, and Docker's own guide is the shortest route past that. It starts from Foundations of Docker — install it, understand what it actually is — and then moves through a small sequence: run your first container, build your first image with an eye on keeping it efficient and reusable, and publish that image to Docker Hub.

That's the whole arc, and its brevity is the feature. You end up having done the loop — run, build, share — rather than having read about it.

What the guide walks through

1. Setup — installing Docker Desktop
2. Fundamentals — running your first container and what that means
3. Image creation — writing a Dockerfile and building something reusable
4. Distribution — pushing to Docker Hub

Around that core, Docker's docs branch into language-specific guides, Compose, networking, volumes and the rest. The Get Started section is deliberately the narrow entrance.

What it leaves out

Almost everything that makes containers hard in production. Nothing meaningful on multi-stage builds and image size, which is the first real problem anyone hits. Nothing on secrets, on running as a non-root user, on image scanning, or on the security posture of what you just published. Orchestration is entirely elsewhere — this guide will not prepare you for Kubernetes or even for Compose in anger.

It's also Docker Desktop-shaped. The instructions assume you install Desktop, which is fine on a personal machine and a licensing question at larger companies. If you're on a Linux server with the engine only, some steps won't map cleanly and the guide doesn't say so.

And the docs are restructured fairly often. Bookmarks into this section have a habit of breaking.

Who it's for — and who should skip it

Right for a developer who keeps seeing Dockerfiles in repos and wants the mental model in an evening. Also right before any DevOps course, because those tend to assume you can already run a container and get impatient if you can't.

Skip it if you need production containerisation — go to the language-specific guides and the Compose documentation instead, then to a security-focused resource. Skip it too if you don't have an application of your own to containerise, because the concepts won't anchor to anything.

Our take

The fastest correct introduction to Docker there is, and it stops well before the point where Docker gets genuinely difficult. Our main complaint is the silence on image size and security — a beginner who follows this guide will publish a bloated container running as root and be given no reason to think that's a problem.