How to deploy Meteor and Phusion Docker to Digital Ocean with Docker?

Here is my suggested workflow:

1. Create an account on Docker Hub, you can get 1 private repository for free. If you want a complete private repository hosted on your own server, you can run an entire docker registry and use it to host your images.

2. Create your image on your development machine (locally or on a server), then push the image to the repository using docker push

3. Update the image when needed and commit your changes with docker commit then push the updated image to your repository (you should properly version and tag all your images)

4. You can start a digital ocean droplet with docker pre-installed (from applications tab) and simply pull your image and run your container. Whenever you update and push your image from your development machine, simple pull it again from the droplet.

For large and complex infrastructure, I would recommend looking into Ansible to configure your docker containers and manage digital ocean droplet as well.

Be aware that your data will be lost if you stop the container, so consider defining a volume in your container that is mapped to a shared folder on your host machine

I suggest you test your Dockerfile in a local VirtualBox VM. I wrote a tutorial about deploying node.js app with Docker. I build several images (layers) instead of just 1. When you update your app, you just need to rebuild the top layer. Hope it helps. http://vinceyuan.blogspot.com/2015/05/deploying-web-app-redis-postgres-and.html