Containerizing a Bun Application with Docker

--- title: Containerize a Bun application linkTitle: Containerize your app weight: 10 keywords: bun, containerize, initialize description: Learn how to containerize a Bun application. aliases: - /language/bun/containerize/ --- ## Prerequisites * You have a [Git client](https://git-scm.com/downloads). The examples in this section use a command-line based Git client, but you can use any client. ## Overview For a long time, Node.js has been the de-facto runtime for server-side JavaScript applications. Recent years have seen a rise in new alternative runtimes in the ecosystem, including [Bun website](https://bun.sh/). Like Node.js, Bun is a JavaScript runtime. Bun is a comparatively lightweight runtime that is designed to be fast and efficient. Why develop Bun applications with Docker? Having multiple runtimes to choose from is great. But as the number of runtimes increases, it becomes challenging to manage the different runtimes and their dependencies consistently across environments. This is where Docker comes in. Creating and destroying containers on demand is a great way to manage the different runtimes and their dependencies. Also, as it's fairly a new runtime, getting a consistent development environment for Bun can be challenging. Docker can help you set up a consistent development environment for Bun. ## 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: ```console $ git clone https://github.com/dockersamples/bun-docker.git && cd bun-docker ``` You should now have the following contents in your `bun-docker` directory. ```text ├── bun-docker/ │ ├── compose.yml │ ├── Dockerfile │ ├── LICENSE │ ├── server.js │ └── README.md ``` In the Dockerfile, you'll notice that the `FROM` instruction uses `oven/bun` as the base image. This is the official image for Bun created by Oven, the company behind Bun. This image is [available on the Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/r/oven/bun).

This document guides you through containerizing a Bun application using Docker. It highlights the benefits of using Docker for managing different JavaScript runtimes like Bun, ensuring consistent environments, and simplifying dependency management. It walks through cloning a sample application from GitHub which uses a Dockerfile with the official Bun image from Oven (oven/bun) as the base.