Docker images creation in a development environment

Summary

Sorry, It´s been a while since my last post, a mixture of not having anything worth writing, holidays and some online training that drains most of my time.
Here is something I would like to share that might reduce the pain for those who want to dockerize their Spring-Boot applications (or any Java application) and then test and tune them while running inside a Docker container.

Former setup

• A commit was pushed to Jenkins, who compiled and unit-tested it.
• After some code analysis, a Docker image was created and pushed to a repository

With set-up, testing was highly inefficient.

• To test it in a server, I had to pull it and execute it and, while I was focused in the performance and memory consumption of my application, tuning the JVM parameters was essential... Unfortunately, they were given at compilation time (a Maven plugin) and could not be changed (or I did not know how to).

The drawbacks I see of this approach:

• It was slow to test new changes, as the whole CI flow needed to be executed.
• Unnecessary docker-related commits to the branch generating the Docker images.

The solution I found? Building the image myself before testing it.