Node.js developers are embracing Docker for repeatable builds, and WebStorm supports Docker-oriented workflows: Quickly bootstrap your Node.js app with a Dockerfile, then run and debug your app in Docker, from the WebStorm IDE.
Let’s take a look.
Note: WebStorm’s Docker support is for server-side Node.js applications. It isn’t aimed at client-side applications, e.g. Angular or React. Nor is it for tools like linters or test runners which need to interact with the editor.
Summary
- Setup your local Docker environment
- Create, run, and debug a local demo Express application
- Connect to your Docker servers
- Setup a remote Node.js interpreter based on Docker
- Run your Express application in Docker, and connect from WebStorm’s REST client
- Debug the Express application, in a Docker container
Background
WebStorm manages the running of your code in Node.js, as well as debugging, profiling, testing, and more. Your run configuration specifies a path to your locally-installed Node.js interpreter – e.g. /usr/local/bin/node – and options that go with it.
WebStorm can also, though, manage remote interpreters. Meaning, your code is executed by a Node.js interpreter inside another environment, such as Vagrant or on an SSH-available server.
With WebStorm 2016.3, Docker is added to the list of remote interpreter options. Once configured, WebStorm will create a new container on each run, with the container bound to the project directory, then execute your project code in the Docker-based Node.js environment.
Docker Setup
Docker has become easy to download and install, across multiple platforms, and in multiple ways. For this article, we targeted macOS and used the standard Docker for Mac package, version 1.13.1 at the time of the writing. This version is after Docker’s switch away from Virtualbox, hallelujah to all our souls.
Hello Express
The purpose of this article isn’t to show developing Node.js applications, but rather, to show running a Node.js application in a container, then talking to it from the IDE. Therefore we’ll use a simple Express app saved in a hello_express.js file, with a single REST endpoint at root that returns ‘Hello World’:
With that file saved in our WebStorm project, we’ll run it with the local interpreter:
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