Dockerizing a Go Application: From Basics to Compose

This tutorial walks through dockerizing a Go application, covering Docker basics, Dockerfile creation, and Docker Compose for multi‑container orchestration. It starts by explaining the concept of a container as a lightweight, portable image that includes code, runtime, and dependencies, and contrasts it with a traditional VM. The guide shows how to install Docker Desktop on Windows with WSL 2, set up a Go module, and write a simple main.go that prints a message. It then creates a Dockerfile that uses golang:1.24 as the base image, copies go.mod, downloads modules, copies source, builds a statically linked binary, and sets the entrypoint. The tutorial also introduces Docker Compose, demonstrating how to define services for the app, a database, and phpMyAdmin, and how to run them together with docker compose up. It emphasizes best practices such as using multi‑stage builds, keeping images small, and separating concerns. By the end, readers can build, run, and manage a Go application in containers, and compose multiple services into a single stack.