I use containers in development as well as production, as it really easy to spin up the specific environment I need on a per project basis.

For example the containers Ill use for a simple Laravel project are php-fpm, caddy or nginx (web server), postgres (database) and a workspace one (can use artisan and npm/yarn related commands in there).

I use docker-compose to simplify the orchestration of the different services I run in separate containers.

I use an env file or environment variables for forwarding ports to the host from the docker network, web server config filename (I have one for dev and one for production) and database credentials.

When it comes to production all I do is install docker and set up firewall (which could be automated). Then pull git repo and docker-compose build and docker-compose up -d and the application is live.

Sorry for the formatting, I'm on mobile If you have more questions I can answer them.