I don't like installing Docker Daemon on my local machine due to battery and resource usage. Instead, I prefer to run Docker on a remote VPS. In the past, I used VS Code's Remote SSH extension to also remotely develop the project, but running VS Code Server on a cheap VPS led to it running out of memory. That is, until I learned about Docker contexts.

Create a remote context

docker context create myremote --docker "host=ssh://user@your-vps-ip"

This creates a context named myremote that connects to the VPS via SSH.

Use the remote context

To switch to the remote context, either:

• Use docker context use:

  docker context use myremote

• Set the DOCKER_CONTEXT environment variable for the shell session:

  export DOCKER_CONTEXT=myremote

Now all docker commands will run against the remote host.

• This also works well with docker compose.
• When building images using docker build, all files in the build context that are not excluded by .dockerignore are automatically uploaded to the remote server for building, so there's no need to manually sync files between local and remote machines.