This guide provides production-grade best practices for building optimized and secure Node.js Docker images, covering topics such as using explicit and deterministic base image tags, installing only production dependencies, optimizing tooling for performance and security, safely terminating processes, finding and fixing security vulnerabilities, using multi-stage builds, keeping unnecessary files out of the image, mounting secrets into the build image, and securing sensitive information. By following these guidelines, developers can create secure and performant Docker base images for their Node.js applications, ensuring a reliable and scalable application deployment.