Simple way to deploy docker app on production machine

Small software house house/freelancer life isn't easy. Reading HN post about fancy new tech is amusing but as much as it is nice to read as much it's often not reachable for team counting one person.
So whenever I read something new I ask myself this simple question.

Is that new thingy/tech single dev scalable ?

Let's consider a docker application deployment problem. It's hard to do it both: quick and good enough (production ready).

Later, when the app matures/goes bigger you can create a proper CI but at this very beginning you need something simple. Here is how I do deal with it.

First deploy a local registry server push your app image there, next create ssh tunnel and do remote port forward. Finally fetch image from registry and run the app.

Let's try it out line by line. I do assume you have a docker build image named my-image-app (either created with docker build or docker compose) and want to deploy it to customer's customer-server.address.net on port 8888 over ssh.

First create a new local docker registry server. As docker docs claims it's as simple as:

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --restart=always --name registry registry:2

Ok your registry server is up and running. Next push your app image to this new registry.
To do that you need to tag my-image-app with a correct name including registry address  ( ie. localhost:5000).

docker tag my-image-app localhost:5000/my-image-app

and then push it to the registry server

docker push localhost:5000/my-image-app

Next connect to remote server via ssh with remote port forwarding

ssh -R 5001:localhost:5000 customer-server.address.net -p 8888

Now you are logged into remote server and your local machine's port 5000 is visible on the remote machine on port 5001.

Finally run your app on the remote machine:

remote-prompt: docker run -d --name my-app localhost:5001/my-image-app

App is running. We are done.

What we can do even better here, is to write you customer server settings into your local .ssh/config file:

host customer-server
 HostName customer-server.address.net
 Port 8888
 User user
 RemoteForward 5001 localhost:5000

Then connecting to remote server is as simple as:

ssh customer-server

You may also consider adding your public key to  .ssh/authorized_keys  on the remote server.

UPDATE: one crucial command connect via ssh was missing when published this first time

UPDATE1: fixed authorized_keys entry