1. Introducing Docker init

When working with containers, you usually need to create a Dockerfile to define your image and a compose.yaml file to define how to run it.

To help you create these files, Docker has a command called docker init. Run this command in a project folder, and Docker will create all the required files needed. In this guide, you will see how this works.

2. Run the command

Open your project folder in the terminal and run the following command:

docker init

Docker will detect the language of your project and prompt you to select a language. You can select your language if it is in the list, or select Other if your language isn’t in the list.

3. Sensible defaults

docker init walks you through a few questions to configure your project with sensible defaults.

4. Some assembly requird

Once you have answered all the questions, you may run docker compose up to run your project.

There is a chance, however, that the Dockerfile and compose.yaml file created for your project need additional changes. In this case, you may need to look up the Dockerfile reference⁠ and Compose file reference⁠ in our documentation. We try our best to do the heavy lifting for you, but sometimes there’s some assembly required.

5. What’s next?

You learned how to containerize your application. Next, learn how to publish your own image to Docker Hub.