SQP Kanban — Containerising a Node.js App with Docker

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been building a simple kanban board called SQP Kanban — a Node.js/Express app backed by MongoDB. The app itself was functional, but it was running bare on my machine with no containerisation, no CI/CD, and no deployment pipeline. Time to fix that.

The App

SQP Kanban is a drag-and-drop project board with columns (To Do, In Progress, Completed, Omit), task cards with date tracking, and colour-coded projects. The frontend is vanilla HTML/JS, the backend is Express with Mongoose, and data lives in MongoDB.

SQP Kanban — The Deployment Process

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post about containerising SQP Kanban. Here’s how the actual process went.

Step 1 — Dockerfile

Straightforward. Alpine-based Node image, copy package.json first (so npm install gets cached), then copy the app code. The main lesson was getting the layer order right for efficient rebuilds.

Step 2 — Manual Docker Run

Before Docker Compose, I ran everything manually to understand what each piece does:

docker network create sqp-network
docker run -d --name sqp-mongo --network sqp-network -v sqp-mongo-data:/data/db mongo:8
docker build -t sqp-kanban .
docker run -d --name sqp-kanban --network sqp-network -p 4000:4000 -e MONGO_URI=mongodb://sqp-mongo:27017/sqp-kanban sqp-kanban

Four commands. Each one taught me something — networks, volumes, port mapping, environment variables. Worth doing manually at least once before reaching for Compose.

Docker-Compose on SQP Dev

SQP Kanban — Containerising a Node.js App with Docker

The App

SQP Kanban — The Deployment Process

Step 1 — Dockerfile

Step 2 — Manual Docker Run