The Docker Book - The Docker Book - James Turnbull - V17.03.0
The Docker Book - The Docker Book - James Turnbull - V17.03.0
James Turnbull
Page
Foreword 1
Who is this book or? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
A note about versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Credits and Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Technical Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Scott Collier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
John Ferlito . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Pris Nasrat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Technical Illustrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Prooreader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Conventions in the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Code and Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Colophon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Errata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Chapter 1 Introduction 6
Introducing Docker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
An easy and lightweight way to model reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
A logical segregation o duties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Fast, ecient development lie cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Encourages service oriented architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Docker components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Docker client and server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
i
Contents
Docker images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Registries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Containers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Compose and Swarm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
What can you use Docker or? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Docker with conguration management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Docker’s technical components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
What’s in the book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Docker resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Drone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Shippable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Index 383
The Docker Book is or developers, sysadmins, and DevOps-minded olks who
want to implement Docker™ and container-based virtualization.
There is an expectation that the reader has basic Linux/Unix skills and is amiliar
with the command line, editing les, installing packages, managing services, and
basic networking.
This books ocuses on Docker Community Edition version v17.03.0-ce and later.
It is not generally backwards-compatible with earlier releases. Indeed, it is rec-
ommended that or production purposes you use Docker version v17.03.0-ce or
later.
In March 2017 Docker re-versioned and renamed their product lines. The Docker
Engine version went rom Docker 1.13.1 to 17.03.0. The product was renamed to
become the Docker Community Edition or Docker CE. When we reer to Docker
in this book we’re generally reerencing the Docker Community Edition.
1
Foreword
Technical Reviewers
Scott Collier
Scott Collier is a Senior Principal System Engineer or Red Hat’s Systems Design
and Engineering team. This team identies and works on high-value solution
stacks based on input rom Sales, Marketing, and Engineering teams and develops
reerence architectures or consumption by internal and external customers. Scott
is a Red Hat Certied Architect (RHCA) with more than 15 years o IT experi-
ence, currently ocused on Docker, OpenShit, and other products in the Red Hat
portolio.
When he’s not tinkering with distributed architectures, he can be ound running,
hiking, camping, and eating barbecue around the Austin, TX, area with his wie
and three children. His notes on technology and other things can be ound at
http://colliernotes.com.
John Ferlito
Pris Nasrat
Technical Illustrator
Royce Gilbert has over 30 years’ experience in CAD design, computer support, net-
work technologies, project management, and business systems analysis or major
Fortune 500 companies, including Enron, Compaq, Koch Industries, and Amoco
Corp. He is currently employed as a Systems/Business Analyst at Kansas State Uni-
versity in Manhattan, KS. In his spare time he does Freelance Art and Technical
Illustration as sole proprietor o Royce Art. He and his wie o 38 years are living
in and restoring a 127-year-old stone house nestled in the Flinthills o Kansas.
Prooreader
Q grew up in the New York area and has been a high school teacher, cupcake icer,
scientist wrangler, orensic anthropologist, and catastrophic disaster response
planner. She now resides in San Francisco, making music, acting, putting together
ng-newsletter, and taking care o the ne olks at Stripe.
Author
James is an author and open-source geek. His most recent books are The Ter-
raorm Book about inrastructure management tool Terraorm, The Art o Moni-
toring about monitoring, The Docker Book about Docker, and The Logstash Book
about the popular open-source logging tool. James also authored two books about
Puppet (Pro Puppet and the earlier book about Puppet). He is the author o three
other books, including Pro Linux System Administration, Pro Nagios 2.0, and Hard-
ening Linux.
He was ormerly CTO at Kickstarter, at Docker as VP o Services and Support,
Venmo as VP o Engineering, and Puppet as VP o Technical Operations. He likes
ood, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on
the beach or holding hands.
You can nd all the code and examples rom the book at http://www.dockerbook.
com/code/index.html, or you can check out the GitHub https://github.com/
turnbullpress/dockerbook-code.
Colophon
This book was written in Markdown with a large dollop o LaTeX. It was then
converted to PDF and other ormats using PanDoc (with some help rom scripts
written by the excellent olks who wrote Backbone.js on Rails).
Errata
Version
Introduction
Containers have a long and storied history in computing. Unlike hypervisor vir-
tualization, where one or more independent machines run virtually on physical
hardware via an intermediation layer, containers instead run in user space on top
o an operating system’s kernel. As a result, container virtualization is oten called
operating system-level virtualization. Container technology allows multiple iso-
lated user space instances to be run on a single host.
As a result o their status as guests o the operating system, containers are some-
times seen as less exible: they can generally only run the same or a similar guest
operating system as the underlying host. For example, you can run Red Hat En-
terprise Linux on an Ubuntu server, but you can’t run Microsot Windows on top
o an Ubuntu server.
Containers have also been seen as less secure than the ull isolation o hypervisor
virtualization. Countering this argument is that lightweight containers lack the
larger attack surace o the ull operating system needed by a virtual machine
combined with the potential exposures o the hypervisor layer itsel.
Despite these limitations, containers have been deployed in a variety o use
cases. They are popular or hyperscale deployments o multi-tenant services, or
lightweight sandboxing, and, despite concerns about their security, as process
isolation environments. Indeed, one o the more common examples o a container
is a chroot jail, which creates an isolated directory environment or running
6
Chapter 1: Introduction
processes. Attackers, i they breach the running process in the jail, then nd
themselves trapped in this environment and unable to urther compromise a host.
More recent container technologies have included OpenVZ, Solaris Zones, and
Linux containers like lxc. Using these more recent technologies, containers can
now look like ull-blown hosts in their own right rather than just execution envi-
ronments. In Docker’s case, having modern Linux kernel eatures, such as control
groups and namespaces, means that containers can have strong isolation, their
own network and storage stacks, as well as resource management capabilities to
allow riendly co-existence o multiple containers on a host.
Containers are generally considered a lean technology because they require lim-
ited overhead. Unlike traditional virtualization or paravirtualization technologies,
they do not require an emulation layer or a hypervisor layer to run and instead
use the operating system’s normal system call interace. This reduces the over-
head required to run containers and can allow a greater density o containers to
run on a host.
Despite their history containers haven’t achieved large-scale adoption. A large
part o this can be laid at the eet o their complexity: containers can be complex,
hard to set up, and dicult to manage and automate. Docker aims to change that.
Introducing Docker
a lightweight and ast environment in which to run your code as well as an ecient
workow to get that code rom your laptop to your test environment and then into
production. Docker is incredibly simple. Indeed, you can get started with Docker
on a minimal host running nothing but a compatible Linux kernel and a Docker
binary. Docker’s mission is to provide:
Docker is ast. You can Dockerize your application in minutes. Docker relies on a
copy-on-write model so that making changes to your application is also incredibly
ast: only what you want to change gets changed.
You can then create containers running your applications. Most Docker contain-
ers take less than a second to launch. Removing the overhead o the hypervisor
also means containers are highly perormant and you can pack more o them into
your hosts and make the best possible use o your resources.
With Docker, Developers care about their applications running inside containers,
and Operations cares about managing the containers. Docker is designed to en-
hance consistency by ensuring the environment in which your developers write
code matches the environments into which your applications are deployed. This
reduces the risk o ”worked in dev, now an ops problem.”
Docker aims to reduce the cycle time between code being written and code being
tested, deployed, and used. It aims to make your applications portable, easy to
build, and easy to collaborate on.
NOTE You don’t need to build your applications this way i you don’t wish.
You can easily run a multi-process application inside a single container.
Docker components
Let’s look at the core components that compose the Docker Community Edition:
• The Docker client and server, also called the Docker Engine.
• Docker Images
• Registries
• Docker Containers
Docker is a client-server application. The Docker client talks to the Docker server
or daemon, which, in turn, does all the work. You’ll also sometimes see the Docker
daemon called the Docker Engine. Docker ships with a command line client binary,
docker, as well as a ull RESTul API to interact with the daemon: dockerd. You
can run the Docker daemon and client on the same host or connect your local
Docker client to a remote daemon running on another host. You can see Docker’s
architecture depicted here:
Docker images
Images are the building blocks o the Docker world. You launch your containers
rom images. Images are the ”build” part o Docker’s lie cycle. They are a lay-
ered ormat, using Union le systems, that are built step-by-step using a series o
instructions. For example:
• Add a le.
• Run a command.
• Open a port.
You can consider images to be the ”source code” or your containers. They are
highly portable and can be shared, stored, and updated. In the book, we’ll learn
how to use existing images as well as build our own images.
Registries
Docker stores the images you build in registries. There are two types o registries:
public and private. Docker, Inc., operates the public registry or images, called
the Docker Hub. You can create an account on the Docker Hub and use it to share
and store your own images.
The Docker Hub also contains, at last count, over 10,000 images that other people
have built and shared. Want a Docker image or an Nginx web server, the Asterisk
open source PABX system, or a MySQL database? All o these are available, along
with a whole lot more.
You can also store images that you want to keep private on the Docker Hub. These
images might include source code or other proprietary inormation you want to
keep secure or only share with other members o your team or organization.
You can also run your own private registry, and we’ll show you how to do that in
Chapter 4. This allows you to store images behind your rewall, which may be a
requirement or some organizations.
Containers
Docker helps you build and deploy containers inside o which you can package
your applications and services. As we’ve just learned, containers are launched
rom images and can contain one or more running processes. You can think about
images as the building or packing aspect o Docker and the containers as the
running or execution aspect o Docker.
A Docker container is:
• An image ormat.
• A set o standard operations.
• An execution environment.
Docker borrows the concept o the standard shipping container, used to transport
goods globally, as a model or its containers. But instead o shipping goods, Docker
containers ship sotware.
Each container contains a sotware image -- its ’cargo’ -- and, like its physical
counterpart, allows a set o operations to be perormed. For example, it can be
created, started, stopped, restarted, and destroyed.
Like a shipping container, Docker doesn’t care about the contents o the container
when perorming these actions; or example, whether a container is a web server,
a database, or an application server. Each container is loaded the same as any
other container.
Docker also doesn’t care where you ship your container: you can build on your
laptop, upload to a registry, then download to a physical or virtual server, test,
deploy to a cluster o a dozen Amazon EC2 hosts, and run. Like a normal shipping
container, it is interchangeable, stackable, portable, and as generic as possible.
With Docker, we can quickly build an application server, a message bus, a utility
appliance, a CI test bed or an application, or one o a thousand other possible ap-
plications, services, and tools. It can build local, sel-contained test environments
or replicate complex application stacks or production or development purposes.
The possible use cases are endless.
In addition to solitary containers we can also run Docker containers in stacks and
clusters, what Docker calls swarms. The Docker ecosystem contains two more
tools:
So why should you care about Docker or containers in general? We’ve discussed
briey the isolation that containers provide; as a result, they make excellent sand-
boxes or a variety o testing purposes. Additionally, because o their ’standard’
nature, they also make excellent building blocks or services. Some o the exam-
ples o Docker running out in the wild include:
• Helping make your local development and build workow aster, more e-
cient, and more lightweight. Local developers can build, run, and share
Docker containers. Containers can be built in development and promoted to
testing environments and, in turn, to production.
• Running stand-alone services and applications consistently across multiple
environments, a concept especially useul in service-oriented architectures
and deployments that rely heavily on micro-services.
• Using Docker to create isolated instances to run tests like, or example, those
launched by a Continuous Integration (CI) suite like Jenkins CI.
• Building and testing complex applications and architectures on a local host
prior to deployment into a production environment.
You can see a list o some o the early projects built on and around the Docker
ecosystem in the blog post here.
It is also apparent that Docker represents (or, perhaps more accurately, encour-
ages) some diferent characteristics and architecture or hosts, applications, and
services: they can be short-lived, immutable, disposable, and service-oriented.
These behaviors do not lend themselves or resonate strongly with the need or
conguration management tools. With these behaviors, you are rarely concerned
with long-term management o state, entropy is less o a concern because contain-
ers rarely live long enough or it to be, and the recreation o state may oten be
cheaper than the remediation o state.
Not all inrastructure can be represented with these behaviors, however. Docker’s
ideal workloads will likely exist alongside more traditional inrastructure deploy-
ment or a little while. The long-lived host, perhaps also the host that needs to
run on physical hardware, still has a role in many organizations. As a result o
these diverse management needs, combined with the need to manage Docker it-
sel, both Docker and conguration management tools are likely to be deployed
in the majority o organizations.
Docker can be run on any x64 host running a modern Linux kernel; we recommend
kernel version 3.10 and later. It has low overhead and can be used on servers,
desktops, or laptops. Run inside a virtual machine, you can also deploy Docker
on OS X and Microsot Windows. It includes:
In this book, we walk you through installing, deploying, managing, and extending
Docker. We do that by rst introducing you to the basics o Docker and its com-
ponents. Then we start to use Docker to build containers and services to perorm
a variety o tasks.
We take you through the development lie cycle, rom testing to production, and
see where Docker ts in and how it can make your lie easier. We make use o
Docker to build test environments or new projects, demonstrate how to integrate
Docker with continuous integration workow, and then how to build application
services and platorms. Finally, we show you how to use Docker’s API and how
to extend Docker yoursel.
We teach you how to:
• Install Docker.
• Take your rst steps with a Docker container.
• Build Docker images.
• Manage and share Docker images.
• Run and manage more complex Docker containers and stacks o Docker con-
tainers.
• Deploy Docker containers as part o your testing pipeline.
• Build multi-container applications and environments.
• Introduce the basics o Docker orchestration with Docker Compose, Consul,
and Swarm.
• Explore the Docker API.
• Getting Help and Extending Docker.
It is recommended that you read through every chapter. Each chapter builds
on your Docker knowledge and introduces new eatures and unctionality. By
the end o the book you should have a solid understanding o how to work with
Docker to build standard containers and deploy applications, test environments,
and standalone services.
Docker resources
• Docker homepage
• Docker Hub
• Docker blog
• Docker documentation
• Docker Getting Started Guide
• Docker code on GitHub
• Docker Forge - collection o Docker tools, utilities, and services.
• Docker mailing list
• The Docker Forum
• Docker on IRC: irc.reenode.net and channel #docker
• Docker on Twitter
• Get Docker help on StackOverow
• Docker.com
Installing Docker
TIP Docker or Mac and Docker or Windows are a collection o components
that installs everything you need to get started with Docker. It includes a tiny
virtual machine shipped with a wrapper script to manage it. The virtual machine
runs the daemon and provides a local Docker daemon on OS X and Microsot Win-
dows. The Docker client binary, docker, is installed natively on these platorms
18
Chapter 2: Installing Docker
and connected to the Docker daemon running in the virtual machine. It replaces
the legacy Docker Toolbox and Boot2Docker.
Docker runs on a number o other platorms, including Debian, SUSE, Arch Linux,
CentOS, and Gentoo. It’s also supported on several Cloud platorms including
Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and Google Compute Engine.
TIP You can nd a ull list o installation targets in the Docker installation
guide.
I’ve chosen these our methods because they represent the environments that are
most commonly used in the Docker community. For example, your developers
and sysadmins may wish to start with building Docker containers on their OS X
or Windows workstations using Docker or Mac or Windows and then promote
these containers to a testing, staging, or production environment running one o
the other supported platorms.
I recommend you step through at least the Ubuntu or the RHEL installation to get
an idea o Docker’s prerequisites and an understanding o how to install it.
TIP As with all installation processes, I also recommend you look at using
tools like Puppet or Che to install Docker rather than using a manual process.
For example, you can nd a Puppet module to install Docker here and a Che
cookbook here.
Requirements
For all o these installation types, Docker has some basic prerequisites. To use
Docker you must:
NOTE This is not to say Docker won’t work on other Ubuntu (or Debian)
versions that have appropriate kernel levels and the additional required support.
They just aren’t ocially supported, so any bugs you encounter may result in a
WONTFIX.
To begin our installation, we rst need to conrm we’ve got all the required pre-
requisites. I’ve created a brand new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit host on which to
install Docker. We’re going to call that host darknight.example.com.
Docker has a small but necessary list o prerequisites required to install and run
on Ubuntu hosts.
Kernel
First, let’s conrm we’ve got a suciently recent Linux kernel. We can do this
using the uname command.
$ uname -a
Linux darknight.example.com 3.13.0-43-generic #72-Ubuntu SMP Mon
Dec 8 19:35:06 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
We see that we’ve got a 3.13.0 x86_64 kernel installed. This is the deault or
Ubuntu 14.04 and later.
We also want to install the linux-image-extra and linux-image-extra-virtual
packages that contain the aufs storage driver.
NOTE Throughout this book we’re going to use sudo to provide the re-
quired root privileges.
We can then update the Grub boot loader to load our new kernel.
$ sudo update-grub
Ater installation, we’ll need to reboot our host to enable the new 3.10 or later
kernel.
$ sudo reboot
Ater the reboot, we can then check that our host is running the right version using
the same uname -a command we used above.
Installing Docker
Now we’ve got everything we need to add Docker to our host. To install Docker,
we’re going to use the Docker team’s DEB packages.
First, we need to install some prerequisite packages.
And then add the Docker APT repository. You may be prompted to conrm that
you wish to add the repository and have the repository’s GPG key automatically
added to your host.
$ sudo add-apt-repository \
"deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(lsb_release -cs) \
stable"
TIP Prior to Docker 1.8.0 the package name was lxc-docker and between
Docker 1.8 and 1.13 the package name was docker-engine.
We should now be able to conrm that Docker is installed and running using the
docker info command.
I you use the UFW, or Uncomplicated Firewall, on Ubuntu, then you’ll need to
make a small change to get it to work with Docker. Docker uses a network bridge
to manage the networking on your containers. By deault, UFW drops all or-
warded packets. You’ll need to enable orwarding in UFW or Docker to unction
correctly. We can do this by editing the /etc/default/ufw le. Inside this le,
change:
DEFAULT_FORWARD_POLICY="DROP"
To:
DEFAULT_FORWARD_POLICY="ACCEPT"
Installing Docker on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or CentOS or Fedora) is currently
only supported on a small selection o releases:
TIP Docker is shipped by Red Hat as a native package on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7 and later. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is the only release on
which Red Hat ocially supports Docker.
Docker has a small but necessary list o prerequisites required to install and run
on Red Hat and the Red Hat amily o distributions.
Kernel
We need to conrm that we have a 3.10 or later kernel version. We can do this
using the uname command like so:
$ uname -a
Linux darknight.example.com 3.10.9-200.fc19.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Aug
21 19:27:58 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
All o the currently supported Red Hat and the Red Hat amily o platorms should
have a kernel that supports Docker.
Installing Docker
The process or installing difers slightly between Red Hat variants. On Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS 6, we will need to add the EPEL package reposi-
tories rst. On Fedora, we do not need the EPEL repositories enabled. There are
also some package-naming diferences between platorms and versions.
For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS 6, we install EPEL by adding the
ollowing RPM.
Listing 2.16: Installing EPEL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS 6
Listing 2.17: Installing the Docker package on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS
6
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and later you can install Docker using these
instructions.
You’ll need to be a Red Hat customer with an appropriate RHEL Server subscrip-
tion entitlement to access the Red Hat Docker packages and documentation.
Installing on Fedora
There have been several package name changes across versions o Fedora. For
Fedora 19, we need to install the docker-io package.
TIP On newer Red Hat and amily versions the yum command has been re-
placed with the dnf command. The syntax is otherwise unchanged.
Finally, on Fedora 22 the package name became docker again. Also on Fedora 22
the yum command was deprecated and replaced with the dnf command.
TIP For Oracle Linux you can nd documentation on the Docker site.
Once the package is installed, we can start the Docker daemon. On Red Hat En-
terprise Linux 6 and CentOS 6 you can use.
Listing 2.23: Starting the Docker daemon on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Listing 2.24: Ensuring the Docker daemon starts at boot on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6
Listing 2.25: Starting the Docker daemon on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Listing 2.26: Ensuring the Docker daemon starts at boot on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7
We should now be able to conrm Docker is installed and running using the docker
info command.
TIP Or you can directly download the latest RPMs rom the Docker site or
RHEL, CentOS and Fedora.
I you’re using OS X, you can quickly get started with Docker using Docker or
Mac. Docker or Mac is a collection o Docker components including a tiny virtual
machine with a supporting command line tool that is installed on an OS X host
and provides you with a Docker environment.
Docker or Mac ships with a variety o components:
• Hyperkit.
• The Docker client and server.
• Docker Compose (see Chapter 7).
• Docker Machine - Which helps you create Docker hosts.
• Kitematic - is a GUI that helps you run Docker locally and interact with the
Docker Hub.
To install Docker or Mac we need to download its installer. You can nd it here.
$ wget https://download.docker.com/mac/stable/Docker.dmg
Launch the downloaded installer and ollow the instructions to install Docker or
Mac.
We can now test that our Docker or Mac installation is working by trying to
connect our local client to the Docker daemon running on the virtual machine.
Make sure the Docker.app is running and then open a terminal window and type:
$ docker info
Containers: 2
Running: 0
Paused: 0
Stopped: 2
Images: 13
Server Version: 1.12.1
Storage Driver: aufs
. . .
I you’re using Microsot Windows, you can quickly get started with Docker using
Docker or Windows. Docker or Windows is a collection o Docker components
including a tiny Hyper-V virtual machine with a supporting command line tool
that is installed on a Microsot Windows host and provides you with a Docker
environment.
Docker or Windows ships with a variety o components:
TIP You can also install a Docker client via the Chocolatey package manager.
To install Docker or Windows we need to download its installer. You can nd it
here.
Let’s grab the current release:
https://download.docker.com/win/stable/InstallDocker.msi
Launch the downloaded installer and ollow the instructions to install Docker or
Windows.
We can now test that our Docker or Windows installation is working by trying
to connect our local client to the Docker daemon running on the virtual machine.
Ensure the Docker application is running and open a terminal window and run:
$ docker info
Containers: 2
Running: 0
Paused: 0
Stopped: 2
Images: 13
Server Version: 1.12.1
Storage Driver: aufs
. . .
I you are ollowing the examples in this book you will sometimes be asked to use
volumes or the docker run command with the -v ag to mount a local directory
into a Docker container may not work on Windows. You can’t mount a local
directory on host into the Docker host running in the Docker virtual machine
because they don’t share a le system. I you want to use any examples with
volumes, such as those in Chapters 5 and 6, I recommend you run Docker on a
Linux-based host.
It’s also worth reading the Docker or Mac File Sharing section or Docker or Win-
dows Shared Drive section. This allows you enable volume usage by mounting
directories into the Docker or Mac and Docker or Windows client applications.
TIP All the examples in the book assume you are using the latest Docker or
Version: v17.03.0 (38f1319) 35
Chapter 2: Installing Docker
NOTE The script currently only supports Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and
Gentoo installation. It may be updated shortly to include other distributions.
$ whereis curl
curl: /usr/bin/curl /usr/bin/X11/curl /usr/share/man/man1/curl.1.
gz
This will ensure that the required dependencies are installed and check that our
kernel is an appropriate version and that it supports an appropriate storage driver.
It will then install Docker and start the Docker daemon.
Binary installation
$ wget http://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-latest.
tgz
Ater we’ve installed Docker, we need to conrm that the Docker daemon is run-
ning. Docker runs as a root-privileged daemon process to allow it to handle op-
erations that can’t be executed by normal users (e.g., mounting lesystems). The
docker binary runs as a client o this daemon and also requires root privileges to
run. You can control the Docker daemon via the dockerd binary.
NOTE Prior to Docker 1.12 the daemon was controlled with the docker
daemon subcommand.
The Docker daemon should be started by deault when the Docker package is
installed. By deault, the daemon listens on a Unix socket at /var/run/docker.
sock or incoming Docker requests. I a group named docker exists on our system,
Docker will apply ownership o the socket to that group. Hence, any user that
belongs to the docker group can run Docker without needing to use the sudo
command.
WARNING Remember that although the docker group makes lie easier,
it is still a security exposure. The docker group is root-equivalent and should be
limited to those users and applications who absolutely need it.
We can change how the Docker daemon binds by adjusting the -H ag when the
daemon is run.
We can use the -H ag to speciy diferent interace and port conguration; or
example, binding to the network:
This would bind the Docker daemon to all interaces on the host. Docker isn’t
automatically aware o networking changes on the client side. We will need to
speciy the -H option to point the docker client at the server; or example, docker
-H :4200 would be required i we had changed the port to 4200. Or, i we don’t
want to speciy the -H on each client call, Docker will also honor the content o
the DOCKER_HOST environment variable.
$ export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://0.0.0.0:2375"
We can also speciy an alternative Unix socket path with the -H ag; or example,
to use unix://home/docker/docker.sock:
TIP I you’re running Docker behind a proxy or corporate rewall you can
also use the HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, NO_PROXY options to control how the dae-
mon connects.
We can also increase the verbosity o the Docker daemon by using the -D ag.
$ sudo dockerd -D
I we want to make these changes permanent, we’ll need to edit the various startup
congurations. On SystemV-enabled Ubuntu and Debian releases, this is done by
editing the /etc/default/docker le and changing the DOCKER_OPTS variable.
On systemd-enabled distributions we would add an override le at:
/etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/override.conf
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H ...
In earlier Red Hat and Fedora releases, we’d edit the /etc/sysconfig/docker le.
NOTE On other platorms, you can manage and update the Docker dae-
mon’s starting conguration via the appropriate init mechanism.
On Ubuntu, i Docker has been installed via package, we can check i the daemon
is running with the Upstart status command:
We can then start or stop the Docker daemon with the Upstart start and stop
commands, respectively.
On systemd-enabled Ubuntu and Debian releases, as well as Red Hat and Fedora,
we can do similarly using the service shortcuts.
Listing 2.45: Starting and stopping Docker on Red Hat and Fedora
I the daemon isn’t running, then the docker binary client will ail with an error
message similar to this:
Upgrading Docker
Ater you’ve installed Docker, it is also easy to upgrade it when required. I you
installed Docker using native packages via apt-get or yum, then you can also use
these channels to upgrade it.
For example, run the apt-get update command and then install the new ver-
sion o Docker. We’re using the apt-get install command because the docker-
engine (ormerly lxc-docker) package is usually pinned.
You can also potentially use a graphical user interace to manage Docker once
you’ve got it installed. Currently, there are a small number o Docker user inter-
aces and web consoles available in various states o development, including:
• Shipyard - Shipyard gives you the ability to manage Docker resources, in-
cluding containers, images, hosts, and more rom a single management in-
terace. It’s open source, and the code is available rom https://github.
com/ehazlett/shipyard.
• Portainer - UI or Docker is a web interace that allows you to interact with
the Docker Remote API. It’s written in JavaScript using the AngularJS rame-
work.
• Kitematic - is a GUI or OS X and Windows that helps you run Docker locally
and interact with the Docker Hub. It’s a ree product released by Docker Inc.
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve seen how to install Docker on a variety o platorms. We’ve
also seen how to manage the Docker daemon.
In the next chapter, we’re going to start using Docker. We’ll begin with container
basics to give you an introduction to basic Docker operations. I you’re all set up
and ready to go then jump into Chapter 3.
In the last chapter, we saw how to install Docker and ensure the Docker daemon
is up and running. In this chapter we’re going to see how to take our rst steps
with Docker and work with our rst container. This chapter will provide you with
the basics o how to interact with Docker.
We’re going to start with checking that Docker is working correctly, and then
we’re going to take a look at the basic Docker workow: creating and managing
containers. We’ll take a container through its typical liecycle rom creation to a
managed state and then stop and remove it.
Firstly, let’s check that the docker binary exists and is unctional:
45
Chapter 3: Getting Started with Docker
Here, we’ve passed the info command to the docker binary, which returns a list o
any containers, any images (the building blocks Docker uses to build containers),
the execution and storage drivers Docker is using, and its basic conguration.
As we’ve learned in previous chapters, Docker has a client-server architecture.
It has two binaries, the Docker server provided via the dockerd binary and the
docker binary, that acts as a client. As a client, the docker binary passes requests
to the Docker daemon (e.g., asking it to return inormation about itsel), and then
processes those requests when they are returned.
Now let’s try and launch our rst container with Docker. We’re going to use the
docker run command to create a container. The docker run command provides
all o the ”launch” capabilities or Docker. We’ll be using it a lot to create new
containers.
TIP You can nd a ull list o the available Docker commands here or by
typing docker help. You can also use the Docker man pages (e.g., man docker-run).
This will not work on Docker or Mac or Docker or OSX as no man pages are
shipped.
Wow. A bunch o stuf happened here when we ran this command. Let’s look at
each piece.
First, we told Docker to run a command using docker run. We passed it two
command line ags: -i and -t. The -i ag keeps STDIN open rom the container,
even i we’re not attached to it. This persistent standard input is one hal o what
we need or an interactive shell. The -t ag is the other hal and tells Docker
to assign a pseudo-tty to the container we’re about to create. This provides us
with an interactive shell in the new container. This line is the base conguration
needed to create a container with which we plan to interact on the command line
rather than run as a daemonized service.
TIP You can nd a ull list o the available Docker run ags here or by
typing docker help run. You can also use the Docker man pages (e.g., example
man docker-run.)
Next, we told Docker which image to use to create a container, in this case the
ubuntu image. The ubuntu image is a stock image, also known as a ”base” image,
provided by Docker, Inc., on the Docker Hub registry. You can use base images
like the ubuntu base image (and the similar fedora, debian, centos, etc., images)
as the basis or building your own images on the operating system o your choice.
For now, we’re just running the base image as the basis or our container and not
adding anything to it.
TIP We’ll hear a lot more about images in Chapter 4, including how to to
build our own images. Throughout the book we use the ubuntu image. This is
a reasonably heavyweight image, measuring a couple o hundred megabytes in
size. I you’d preer something smaller the Alpine Linux image is recommended
as extremely lightweight, generally 5Mb in size or the base image. Its image
name is alpine.
So what was happening in the background here? Firstly, Docker checked locally
or the ubuntu image. I it can’t nd the image on our local Docker host, it will
reach out to the Docker Hub registry run by Docker, Inc., and look or it there.
Once Docker had ound the image, it downloaded the image and stored it on the
local host.
Docker then used this image to create a new container inside a lesystem. The
container has a network, IP address, and a bridge interace to talk to the local
host. Finally, we told Docker which command to run in our new container, in this
case launching a Bash shell with the /bin/bash command.
When the container had been created, Docker ran the /bin/bash command inside
it; the container’s shell was presented to us like so:
root@f7cbdac22a02:/#
root@f7cbdac22a02:/# hostname
f7cbdac22a02
We see that our container’s hostname is the container ID. Let’s have a look at the
/etc/hosts le too.
Docker has also added a host entry or our container with its IP address.
Let’s also check out its networking conguration.
root@f7cbdac22a02:/# hostname -I
172.17.0.4
We see that we have an IP address o 172.17.0.4, just like any other host. We can
also check its running processes.
root@f7cbdac22a02:/# ps -aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME
COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 18156 1936 ? Ss May30 0:00
/bin/bash
root 21 0.0 0.0 15568 1100 ? R+ 02:38 0:00
ps -aux
So what’s happened to our container? Well, it has now stopped running. The
container only runs or as long as the command we specied, /bin/bash, is run-
ning. Once we exited the container, that command ended, and the container was
stopped.
The container still exists; we can show a list o current containers using the docker
ps -a command.
By deault, when we run just docker ps, we will only see the running containers.
When we speciy the -a ag, the docker ps command will show us all containers,
both stopped and running.
TIP You can also use the docker ps command with the -l ag to show the
last container that was run, whether it is running or stopped. You can also use
the --format ag to urther control what and how inormation is outputted.
We see quite a bit o inormation about our container: its ID, the image used to
create it, the command it last ran, when it was created, and its exit status (in our
case, 0, because it was exited normally using the exit command). We can also
see that each container has a name.
NOTE There are three ways containers can be identied: a short UUID
(like f7cbdac22a02), a longer UUID (like f7cbdac22a02e03c9438c729345e54db9d
20cfa2ac1fc3494b6eb60872e74778), and a name (like gray_cat).
Container naming
Docker will automatically generate a name at random or each container we create.
We see that the container we’ve just created is called gray_cat. I we want to
speciy a particular container name in place o the automatically generated name,
we can do so using the --name ag.
We can use the container name in place o the container ID in most Docker com-
mands, as we’ll see. Container names are useul to help us identiy and build
logical connections between containers and applications. It’s also much easier to
remember a specic container name (e.g., web or db) than a container ID or even
a random name. I recommend using container names to make managing your
containers easier.
NOTE We’ll see more about how to connect Docker containers in Chapter
5.
Names are unique. I we try to create two containers with the same name, the
command will ail. We need to delete the previous container with the same name
beore we can create a new one. We can do so with the docker rm command.
Now i we run the docker ps command without the -a ag, we’ll see our running
container.
NOTE In a similar vein there is also the docker create command which
creates a container but does not run it. This allows you more granular control
over your container workow.
Attaching to a container
Our container will restart with the same options we’d specied when we launched
it with the docker run command. So there is an interactive session waiting on
our running container. We can reattach to that session using the docker attach
command.
root@aa3f365f0f4e:/#
Here, we’ve used the docker run command with the -d ag to tell Docker to
detach the container to the background.
We’ve also specied a while loop as our container command. Our loop will echo
hello world over and over again until the container is stopped or the process
stops.
With this combination o ags, you’ll see that, instead o being attached to a shell
like our last container, the docker run command has instead returned a container
ID and returned us to our command prompt. Now i we run docker ps, we see a
running container.
We now have a daemonized container running our while loop; let’s take a look
inside the container and see what’s happening. To do so, we can use the docker
logs command. The docker logs command etches the logs o a container.
Here we see the results o our while loop echoing hello world to the logs. Docker
will output the last ew log entries and then return. We can also monitor the
container’s logs much like the tail -f binary operates using the -f ag.
You can also tail a portion o the logs o a container, again much like the tail
command with the -f --tail ags. For example, you can get the last ten lines
o a log by using docker logs --tail 10 daemon_dave. You can also ollow the
logs o a container without having to read the whole log le with docker logs -
-tail 0 -f daemon_dave.
To make debugging a little easier, we can also add the -t ag to prex our log
entries with timestamps.
Since Docker 1.6 you can also control the logging driver used by your daemon and
container. This is done using the --log-driver option. You can pass this option
to both the daemon and the docker run command.
There are a variety o options including the deault json-file which provides the
behavior we’ve just seen using the docker logs command.
Also available is syslog which disables the docker logs command and redirects
all container log output to Syslog. You can speciy this with the Docker daemon
to output all container logs to Syslog or override it using docker run to direct
output rom individual containers.
TIP I you’re running inside Docker or Mac or Windows you might need to
start the Syslog daemon inside the VM. Use docker-machine ssh to connect to
the Docker VM and run the syslogd command to start the Syslog daemon.
This will cause the daemon_dwayne container to log to Syslog and result in the
docker logs command showing no output.
Lastly, also available is none, which disables all logging in containers and results
in the docker logs command being disabled.
In addition to the container’s logs we can also inspect the processes running inside
the container. To do this, we use the docker top command.
We can then see each process (principally our while loop), the user it is running
as, and the process ID.
Docker statistics
In addition to the docker top command you can also use the docker stats com-
mand. This shows statistics or one or more running Docker containers. Let’s see
what these look like. We’re going to look at the statistics or our daemon_dave and
daemon_dwayne containers.
We see a list o daemonized containers and their CPU, memory and network and
storage I/O perormance and metrics. This is useul or quickly monitoring a group
o containers on a host.
Since Docker 1.3 we can also run additional processes inside our containers using
the docker exec command. There are two types o commands we can run inside a
container: background and interactive. Background tasks run inside the container
without interaction and interactive tasks remain in the oreground. Interactive
tasks are useul or tasks like opening a shell inside a container. Let’s look at an
example o a background task.
Here the -d ag indicates we’re running a background process. We then speciy
the name o the container to run the command inside and the command to be
executed. In this case our command will create a new empty le called /etc/
new_config_file inside our daemon_dave container. We can use a docker exec
background command to run maintenance, monitoring or management tasks in-
side a running container.
TIP Since Docker 1.7 you can use the -u ag to speciy a new process owner
or docker exec launched processes.
We can also run interactive tasks like opening a shell inside our daemon_dave
container.
The -t and -i ags, like the ags used when running an interactive container,
create a TTY and capture STDIN or our executed process. We then speciy the
name o the container to run the command inside and the command to be executed.
In this case our command will create a new bash session inside the container
daemon_dave. We could then use this session to issue other commands inside our
container.
NOTE The docker exec command was introduced in Docker 1.3 and is
not available in earlier releases. For earlier Docker releases you should see the
nsenter command explained in Chapter 6.
I we wish to stop our daemonized container, we can do it with the docker stop
command, like so:
NOTE The docker stop command sends a SIGTERM signal to the Docker
container’s running process. I you want to stop a container a bit more enthusias-
tically, you can use the docker kill command, which will send a SIGKILL signal
to the container’s process.
Run docker ps to check the status o the now-stopped container. Useul here is
the docker ps -n x ag which shows the last x containers, running or stopped.
I your container has stopped because o a ailure you can congure Docker to
restart it using the --restart ag. The --restart ag checks or the container’s
exit code and makes a decision whether or not to restart it. The deault behavior
is to not restart containers at all.
You speciy the --restart ag with the docker run command.
In this example the --restart ag has been set to always. Docker will try to
restart the container no matter what exit code is returned. Alternatively, we can
speciy a value o on-failure which restarts the container i it exits with a non-
zero exit code. The on-failure ag also accepts an optional restart count.
--restart=on-failure:5
This will attempt to restart the container a maximum o ve times i a non-zero
exit code is received.
In addition to the inormation we retrieved about our container using the docker
ps command, we can get a whole lot more inormation using the docker inspect
command.
The docker inspect command will interrogate our container and return its con-
guration inormation, including names, commands, networking conguration,
and a wide variety o other useul data.
We can also selectively query the inspect results hash using the -f or --format
ag.
This will return the running state o the container, which in our case is true. We
can also get useul inormation like the container’s IP address.
TIP The --format or -f ag is a bit more than it seems on the surace. It’s
actually a ull Go template being exposed. You can make use o all the capabilities
o a Go template when querying it.
We can also list multiple containers and receive output or each.
We can select any portion o the inspect hash to query and return.
NOTE In addition to inspecting containers, you can see a bit more about
how Docker works by exploring the /var/lib/docker directory. This directory
holds your images, containers, and container conguration. You’ll nd all your
containers in the /var/lib/docker/containers directory.
Deleting a container
I you are nished with a container, you can delete it using the docker rm com-
mand.
NOTE Since Docker 1.6.2 you can delete a running Docker container using
the -f ag to the docker rm command. Prior to this version you must stop the
container rst using the docker stop command or docker kill command.
There isn’t currently a way to delete all containers, but you can slightly cheat with
a command like the ollowing:
This command will list all o the current containers using the docker ps command.
The -a ag lists all containers, and the -q ag only returns the container IDs rather
than the rest o the inormation about your containers. This list is then passed to
the docker rm command, which deletes each container. The -f ag orce removes
any running containers. I you’d preer to protect those containers, omit the ag.
Summary
We’ve now been introduced to the basic mechanics o how Docker containers work.
This inormation will orm the basis or how we’ll learn to use Docker in the rest
o the book.
In the next chapter, we’re going to explore building our own Docker images and
working with Docker repositories and registries.
70
Chapter 4: Working with Docker images and repositories
Let’s continue our journey with Docker by learning a bit more about Docker im-
ages. A Docker image is made up o lesystems layered over each other. At the
base is a boot lesystem, bootfs, which resembles the typical Linux/Unix boot
lesystem. A Docker user will probably never interact with the boot lesystem.
Indeed, when a container has booted, it is moved into memory, and the boot
lesystem is unmounted to ree up the RAM used by the initrd disk image.
So ar this looks pretty much like a typical Linux virtualization stack. Indeed,
Docker next layers a root lesystem, rootfs, on top o the boot lesystem. This
rootfs can be one or more operating systems (e.g., a Debian or Ubuntu lesys-
tem).
In a more traditional Linux boot, the root lesystem is mounted read-only and
then switched to read-write ater boot and an integrity check is conducted. In the
Docker world, however, the root lesystem stays in read-only mode, and Docker
takes advantage o a union mount to add more read-only lesystems onto the
root lesystem. A union mount is a mount that allows several lesystems to be
mounted at one time but appear to be one lesystem. The union mount overlays
the lesystems on top o one another so that the resulting lesystem may contain
les and subdirectories rom any or all o the underlying lesystems.
Docker calls each o these lesystems images. Images can be layered on top o
one another. The image below is called the parent image and you can traverse
each layer until you reach the bottom o the image stack where the nal image
is called the base image. Finally, when a container is launched rom an image,
Docker mounts a read-write lesystem on top o any layers below. This is where
whatever processes we want our Docker container to run will execute.
This sounds conusing, so perhaps it is best represented by a diagram.
When Docker rst starts a container, the initial read-write layer is empty. As
changes occur, they are applied to this layer; or example, i you want to change
a le, then that le will be copied rom the read-only layer below into the read-
write layer. The read-only version o the le will still exist but is now hidden
underneath the copy.
This pattern is traditionally called ”copy on write” and is one o the eatures that
makes Docker so powerul. Each read-only image layer is read-only; this image
never changes. When a container is created, Docker builds rom the stack o im-
ages and then adds the read-write layer on top. That layer, combined with the
knowledge o the image layers below it and some conguration data, orm the con-
tainer. As we discovered in the last chapter, containers can be changed, they have
state, and they can be started and stopped. This, and the image-layering rame-
work, allows us to quickly build images and run containers with our applications
and services.
Let’s get started with Docker images by looking at what images are available to
us on our Docker host. We can do this using the docker images command.
We see that we’ve got an image, rom a repository called ubuntu. So where does
this image come rom? Remember in Chapter 3, when we ran the docker run
command, that part o the process was downloading an image? In our case, it’s
the ubuntu image.
NOTE Local images live on our local Docker host in the /var/lib/docker
directory. Each image will be inside a directory named or your storage driver;
or example, aufs or devicemapper. You’ll also nd all your containers in the
/var/lib/docker/containers directory.
That image was downloaded rom a repository. Images live inside repositories,
and repositories live on registries. The deault registry is the public registry man-
aged by Docker, Inc., Docker Hub.
TIP The Docker registry code is open source. You can also run your own
registry, as we’ll see later in this chapter. The Docker Hub product is also available
as a commercial ”behind the rewall” product called Docker Trusted Registry,
ormerly Docker Enterprise Hub.
Inside Docker Hub (or on a Docker registry you run yoursel), images are stored
in repositories. You can think o an image repository as being much like a Git
repository. It contains images, layers, and metadata about those images.
Each repository can contain multiple images (e.g., the ubuntu repository contains
images or Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 16.04). Let’s get another
image rom the ubuntu repository now.
Here we’ve used the docker pull command to pull down the Ubuntu 16.04 image
rom the ubuntu repository.
Let’s see what our docker images command reveals now.
TIP Throughout the book we use the ubuntu image. This is a reasonably
heavyweight image, measuring a couple o hundred megabytes in size. I you’d
preer something smaller the Alpine Linux image is recommended as extremely
lightweight, generally 5Mb in size or the base image. Its image name is alpine.
You can see we’ve now got the latest Ubuntu image and the 16.04 image. This
shows us that the ubuntu image is actually a series o images collected under a
single repository.
NOTE We call it the Ubuntu operating system, but really it is not the ull
operating system. It’s a cut-down version with the bare runtime required to run
the distribution.
We identiy each image inside that repository by what Docker calls tags. Each
image is being listed by the tags applied to it, so, or example, 12.04, 12.10,
quantal, or precise and so on. Each tag marks together a series o image layers
that represent a specic image (e.g., the 16.04 tag collects together all the layers
o the Ubuntu 16.04 image). This allows us to store more than one image inside
a repository.
We can reer to a specic image inside a repository by suxing the repository
name with a colon and a tag name, or example:
This launches a container rom the ubuntu:16.04 image, which is an Ubuntu 16.04
operating system.
It’s always a good idea to build a container rom specic tags. That way we’ll know
exactly what the source o our container is. There are diferences, or example,
between Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, so it would be useul to specically state that
we’re using ubuntu:16.04 so we know exactly what we’re getting.
There are two types o repositories: user repositories, which contain images con-
tributed by Docker users, and top-level repositories, which are controlled by the
people behind Docker.
A user repository takes the orm o a username and a repository name; or example,
jamtur01/puppet.
• Username: jamtur01
• Repository name: puppet
Alternatively, a top-level repository only has a repository name like ubuntu. The
top-level repositories are managed by Docker Inc and by selected vendors who pro-
vide curated base images that you can build upon (e.g., the Fedora team provides
a fedora image). The top-level repositories also represent a commitment rom
vendors and Docker Inc that the images contained in them are well constructed,
secure, and up to date.
In Docker 1.8 support was also added or managing the content security o images,
essentially signed images. This is currently an optional eature and you can read
more about it on the Docker blog.
Pulling images
When we run a container rom images with the docker run command, i the image
isn’t present locally already then Docker will download it rom the Docker Hub.
By deault, i you don’t speciy a specic tag, Docker will download the latest
tag, or example:
Will download the ubuntu:latest image i it isn’t already present on the host.
Alternatively, we can use the docker pull command to pull images down our-
selves preemptively. Using docker pull saves us some time launching a container
rom a new image. Let’s see that now by pulling down the ‘edora:21 base image.
Let’s see this new image on our Docker host using the docker images command.
This time, however, let’s narrow our review o the images to only the fedora im-
ages. To do so, we can speciy the image name ater the docker images command.
We see that the fedora:21 image has been downloaded. We could also download
another tagged image using the docker pull command.
We can also search all o the publicly available images on Docker Hub using the
docker search command:
TIP You can also browse the available images online at Docker Hub.
Here, we’ve searched the Docker Hub or the term puppet. It’ll search images and
return:
• Repository names
• Image descriptions
• Stars - these measure the popularity o an image
• Ocial - an image managed by the upstream developer (e.g., the fedora
image managed by the Fedora team)
• Automated - an image built by the Docker Hub’s Automated Build process
NOTE We’ll see more about Automated Builds later in this chapter.
This will pull down the jamtur01/puppetmaster image (which, by the way, con-
tains a pre-installed Puppet master server).
We can then use this image to build a new container. Let’s do that now using the
docker run command again.
You can see we’ve launched a new container rom our jamtur01/puppetmaster
image. We’ve launched the container interactively and told the container to
run the Bash shell. Once inside the container’s shell, we’ve run Facter (Puppet’s
inventory application), which was pre-installed on our image. From inside the
container, we’ve also run the puppet binary to conrm it is installed.
So we’ve seen that we can pull down pre-prepared images with custom contents.
How do we go about modiying our own images and updating and managing them?
There are two ways to create a Docker image:
A big part o image building is sharing and distributing your images. We do this
by pushing them to the Docker Hub or your own registry. To acilitate this, let’s
start by creating an account on the Docker Hub. You can join Docker Hub here.
Create an account and veriy your email address rom the email you’ll receive ater
signing up.
Now let’s test our new account rom Docker. To sign into the Docker Hub you can
use the docker login command.
This command will log you into the Docker Hub and store your credentials or
uture use. You can use the docker logout command to log out rom a registry
server.
The rst method o creating images uses the docker commit command. You can
think about this method as much like making a commit in a version control system.
We create a container, make changes to that container as you would change code,
and then commit those changes to a new image.
Let’s start by creating a container rom the ubuntu image we’ve used in the past.
We’ve launched our container and then installed Apache within it. We’re going
to use this container as a web server, so we’ll want to save it in its current state.
That will save us rom having to rebuild it with Apache every time we create a
new container. To do this we exit rom the container, using the exit command,
You can see we’ve used the docker commit command and specied the ID o the
container we’ve just changed (to nd that ID you could use the docker ps -l
-q command to return the ID o the last created container) as well as a target
repository and image name, here jamtur01/apache2. O note is that the docker
commit command only commits the diferences between the image the container
was created rom and the current state o the container. This means updates are
lightweight.
Let’s look at our new image.
We can also provide some more data about our changes when committing our
image, including tags. For example:
Here, we’ve specied some more inormation while committing our new image.
We’ve added the -m option which allows us to provide a commit message explain-
ing our new image. We’ve also specied the -a option to list the author o the
image. We’ve then specied the ID o the container we’re committing. Finally,
we’ve specied the username and repository o the image, jamtur01/apache2, and
we’ve added a tag, webserver, to our image.
We can view this inormation about our image using the docker inspect com-
mand.
TIP You can nd a ull list o the docker commit ags here.
I we want to run a container rom our new image, we can do so using the docker
run command.
You’ll note that we’ve specied our image with the ull tag: jamtur01/apache2:
webserver.
Let’s now create a directory and an initial Dockerfile. We’re going to build a
Docker image that contains a simple web server.
$ mkdir static_web
$ cd static_web
$ touch Dockerfile
We’ve created a directory called static_web to hold our Dockerfile. This di-
rectory is our build environment, which is what Docker calls a context or build
context. Docker will upload the build context, as well as any les and directories
contained in it, to our Docker daemon when the build is run. This provides the
Docker daemon with direct access to any code, les or other data you might want
to include in the image.
We’ve also created an empty Dockerfile le to get started. Now let’s look at an
example o a Dockerfile to create a Docker image that will act as a Web server.
# Version: 0.0.1
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
RUN apt-get update; apt-get install -y nginx
RUN echo 'Hi, I am in your container' \
>/var/www/html/index.html
EXPOSE 80
This means that i your Dockerfile stops or some reason (or example, i an
instruction ails to complete), you will be let with an image you can use. This is
highly useul or debugging: you can run a container rom this image interactively
and then debug why your instruction ailed using the last image created.
NOTE The Dockerfile also supports comments. Any line that starts with
a # is considered a comment. You can see an example o this in the rst line o
our Dockerfile.
The rst instruction in a Dockerfile must be FROM. The FROM instruction species
an existing image that the ollowing instructions will operate on; this image is
called the base image.
In our sample Dockerfile we’ve specied the ubuntu:16.04 image as our base
image. This specication will build an image on top o an Ubuntu 16.04 base
operating system. As with running a container, you should always be specic
about exactly rom which base image you are building.
Next, we’ve specied the MAINTAINER instruction, which tells Docker who the au-
thor o the image is and what their email address is. This is useul or speciying
an owner and contact or an image.
We’ve ollowed these instructions with two RUN instructions. The RUN instruction
executes commands on the current image. The commands in our example: up-
dating the installed APT repositories and installing the nginx package and then
creating the /var/www/html/index.html le containing some example text. As
we’ve discovered, each o these instructions will create a new layer and, i suc-
cessul, will commit that layer and then execute the next instruction.
By deault, the RUN instruction executes inside a shell using the command wrapper
/bin/sh -c. I you are running the instruction on a platorm without a shell or
you wish to execute without a shell (or example, to avoid shell string munging),
you can speciy the instruction in exec ormat:
NOTE Docker also uses the EXPOSE instruction to help link together con-
tainers, which we’ll see in Chapter 5. You can expose ports at run time with the
docker run command with the --expose option.
All o the instructions will be executed and committed and a new image returned
when we run the docker build command. Let’s try that now:
$ cd static_web
$ sudo docker build -t="jamtur01/static_web" .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 2.56 kB
Sending build context to Docker daemon
Step 0 : FROM ubuntu:16.04
---> ba5877dc9bec
Step 1 : MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
---> Running in b8ffa06f9274
---> 4c66c9dcee35
Removing intermediate container b8ffa06f9274
Step 2 : RUN apt-get update
---> Running in f331636c84f7
---> 9d938b9e0090
Removing intermediate container f331636c84f7
Step 3 : RUN apt-get install -y nginx
---> Running in 4b989d4730dd
---> 93fb180f3bc9
Removing intermediate container 4b989d4730dd
Step 4 : RUN echo 'Hi, I am in your container'
>/var/www/html/index.html
---> Running in b51bacc46eb9
---> b584f4ac1def
Removing intermediate container b51bacc46eb9
Step 5 : EXPOSE 80
---> Running in 7ff423bd1f4d
---> 22d47c8cb6e5
Successfully built 22d47c8cb6e5
We’ve used the docker build command to build our new image. We’ve specied
the -t option to mark our resulting image with a repository and a name, here the
jamtur01 repository and the image name static_web. I strongly recommend you
always name your images to make it easier to track and manage them.
You can also tag images during the build process by suxing the tag ater the
image name with a colon, or example:
TIP I you don’t speciy any tag, Docker will automatically tag your image
as latest.
The trailing . tells Docker to look in the local directory to nd the Dockerfile.
You can also speciy a Git repository as a source or the Dockerfile as we see
here:
Here Docker assumes that there is a Dockerfile located in the root o the Git
repository.
TIP Since Docker 1.5.0 and later you can also speciy a path to a le to use as a
build source using the -f ag. For example, docker build -t "jamtur01/static_-
web" -f /path/to/file. The le specied doesn’t need to be called Dockerfile
but must still be within the build context.
But back to our docker build process. You can see that the build context has
been uploaded to the Docker daemon.
TIP I a le named .dockerignore exists in the root o the build context
then it is interpreted as a newline-separated list o exclusion patterns. Much like
a .gitignore le it excludes the listed les rom being treated as part o the build
context, and thereore prevents them rom being uploaded to the Docker daemon.
Globbing can be done using Go’s lepath.
Next, you can see that each instruction in the Dockerfile has been executed with
the image ID, 22d47c8cb6e5, being returned as the nal output o the build pro-
cess. Each step and its associated instruction are run individually, and Docker has
committed the result o each operation beore outputting that nal image ID.
$ cd static_web
$ sudo docker build -t="jamtur01/static_web" .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 2.56 kB
Sending build context to Docker daemon
Step 1 : FROM ubuntu:16.04
---> 8dbd9e392a96
Step 2 : MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
---> Running in d97e0c1cf6ea
---> 85130977028d
Step 3 : RUN apt-get update
---> Running in 85130977028d
---> 997485f46ec4
Step 4 : RUN apt-get install -y ngin
---> Running in ffca16d58fd8
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
E: Unable to locate package ngin
2014/06/04 18:41:11 The command [/bin/sh -c apt-get install -y
ngin] returned a non-zero code: 100
Let’s say I want to debug this ailure. I can use the docker run command to create
a container rom the last step that succeeded in my Docker build, in this example
using the image ID o 997485f46ec4.
I can then try to run the apt-get install -y ngin step again with the right pack-
age name or conduct some other debugging to determine what went wrong. Once
I’ve identied the issue, I can exit the container, update my Dockerfile with the
right package name, and retry my build.
As a result o the build cache, you can build your Dockerfiles in the orm o
simple templates (e.g., adding a package repository or updating packages near
the top o the le to ensure the cache is hit). I generally have the same template
set o instructions in the top o my Dockerfile, or example or Ubuntu:
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-07-01
RUN apt-get -qq update
Let’s step through this new Dockerfile. Firstly, I’ve used the FROM instruction
to speciy a base image o ubuntu:16.04. Next, I’ve added my MAINTAINER in-
struction to provide my contact details. I’ve then specied a new instruction, ENV.
The ENV instruction sets environment variables in the image. In this case, I’ve
specied the ENV instruction to set an environment variable called REFRESHED_AT,
showing when the template was last updated. Lastly, I’ve specied the apt-get
-qq update command in a RUN instruction. This rereshes the APT package cache
when it’s run, ensuring that the latest packages are available to install.
With my template, when I want to reresh the build, I change the date in my ENV
instruction. Docker then resets the cache when it hits that ENV instruction and runs
every subsequent instruction anew without relying on the cache. This means my
RUN apt-get update instruction is rerun and my package cache is rereshed with
the latest content. You can extend this template example or your target platorm
or to t a variety o needs. For example, or a fedora image we might:
FROM fedora:21
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-07-01
RUN yum -q makecache
Now let’s take a look at our new image. We can do this using the docker images
command.
I we want to drill down into how our image was created, we can use the docker
history command.
We see each o the image layers inside our new jamtur01/static_web image and
the Dockerfile instruction that created them.
Let’s launch a new container using our new image and see i what we’ve built has
worked.
Here I’ve launched a new container called static_web using the docker run com-
mand and the name o the image we’ve just created. We’ve specied the -d option,
which tells Docker to run detached in the background. This allows us to run long-
running processes like the Nginx daemon. We’ve also specied a command or
the container to run: nginx -g "daemon off;". This will launch Nginx in the
oreground to run our web server.
We’ve also specied a new ag, -p. The -p ag manages which network ports
Docker publishes at runtime. When you run a container, Docker has two methods
o assigning ports on the Docker host:
• Docker can randomly assign a high port rom the range 32768 to 61000 on
the Docker host that maps to port 80 on the container.
• You can speciy a specic port on the Docker host that maps to port 80 on
the container.
The docker run command will open a random port on the Docker host that will
connect to port 80 on the Docker container.
Let’s look at what port has been assigned using the docker ps command. The -l
ag tells Docker to show us the last container launched.
$ sudo docker ps -l
CONTAINER ID IMAGE ... PORTS
NAMES
6751b94bb5c0 jamtur01/static_web:latest ... 0.0.0.0:49154->80/
tcp static_web
We see that port 49154 is mapped to the container port o 80. We can get the
same inormation with the docker port command.
We’ve specied the container ID and the container port or which we’d like to see
the mapping, 80, and it has returned the mapped port, 49154.
Or we could use the container name too.
The -p option also allows us to be exible about how a port is published to the
host. For example, we can speciy that Docker bind the port to a specic port:
This will bind port 80 on the container to port 80 on the local host. It’s impor-
tant to be wary o this direct binding: i you’re running multiple containers, only
one container can bind a specic port on the local host. This can limit Docker’s
exibility.
To avoid this, we could bind to a diferent port.
This would bind port 80 on the container to port 8080 on the local host.
We can also bind to a specic interace.
Here we’ve bound port 80 o the container to port 80 on the 127.0.0.1 interace
on the local host. We can also bind to a random port using the same structure.
Here we’ve removed the specic port to bind to on 127.0.0.1. We would now
use the docker inspect or docker port command to see which random port was
assigned to port 80 on the container.
TIP You can bind UDP ports by adding the sux /udp to the port binding.
Docker also has a shortcut, -P, that allows us to publish all ports we’ve exposed
via EXPOSE instructions in our Dockerfile.
This would publish port 80 on a random port on our local host. It would also
publish any additional ports we had specied with other EXPOSE instructions in
the Dockerfile that built our image.
With this port number, we can now view the web server on the running container
using the IP address o our host or the localhost on 127.0.0.1.
NOTE You can nd the IP address o your local host with the ifconfig or
ip addr command.
$ curl localhost:49154
Hi, I am in your container
Dockerle instructions
We’ve already seen some o the available Dockerfile instructions, like RUN and
EXPOSE. But there are also a variety o other instructions we can put in our
Dockerfile. These include CMD, ENTRYPOINT, ADD, COPY, VOLUME, WORKDIR, USER,
ONBUILD, LABEL, STOPSIGNAL, ARG, SHELL, HEALTHCHECK and ENV. You can see a ull
list o the available Dockerfile instructions here.
We’ll also see a lot more Dockerfiles in the next ew chapters and see how to
build some cool applications into Docker containers.
CMD
The CMD instruction species the command to run when a container is launched. It
is similar to the RUN instruction, but rather than running the command when the
container is being built, it will speciy the command to run when the container
is launched, much like speciying a command to run when launching a container
with the docker run command, or example:
CMD ["/bin/true"]
Lastly, it’s important to understand that we can override the CMD instruction using
the docker run command. I we speciy a CMD in our Dockerfile and one on the
docker run command line, then the command line will override the Dockerfile’s
CMD instruction.
NOTE It’s also important to understand the interaction between the CMD
instruction and the ENTRYPOINT instruction. We’ll see some more details o this
below.
Let’s look at this process a little more closely. Let’s say our Dockerfile contains
the CMD:
CMD [ "/bin/bash" ]
We can build a new image (let’s call it jamtur01/test) using the docker build
command and then launch a new container rom this image.
You can see here that we have specied the /bin/ps command to list running
processes. Instead o launching a shell, the container merely returned the list
o running processes and stopped, overriding the command specied in the CMD
instruction.
TIP You can only speciy one CMD instruction in a Dockerfile. I more than
one is specied, then the last CMD instruction will be used. I you need to run
multiple processes or commands as part o starting a container you should use a
service management tool like Supervisor.
ENTRYPOINT
Closely related to the CMD instruction, and oten conused with it, is the ENTRYPOINT
instruction. So what’s the diference between the two, and why are they both
needed? As we’ve just discovered, we can override the CMD instruction on the
docker run command line. Sometimes this isn’t great when we want a container
to behave in a certain way. The ENTRYPOINT instruction provides a command
that isn’t as easily overridden. Instead, any arguments we speciy on the docker
run command line will be passed as arguments to the command specied in the
ENTRYPOINT. Let’s see an example o an ENTRYPOINT instruction.
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/sbin/nginx"]
Like the CMD instruction, we also speciy parameters by adding to the array. For
example:
NOTE As with the CMD instruction above, you can see that we’ve specied
the ENTRYPOINT command in an array to avoid any issues with the command being
prepended with /bin/sh -c.
We’ve rebuilt our image and then launched an interactive container. We specied
the argument -g "daemon off;". This argument will be passed to the command
specied in the ENTRYPOINT instruction, which will thus become /usr/sbin/nginx
-g "daemon off;". This command would then launch the Nginx daemon in the
oreground and leave the container running as a web server.
We can also combine ENTRYPOINT and CMD to do some neat things. For example,
we might want to speciy the ollowing in our Dockerfile.
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/sbin/nginx"]
CMD ["-h"]
Now when we launch a container, any option we speciy will be passed to the
Nginx daemon; or example, we could speciy -g "daemon off"; as we did above
to run the daemon in the oreground. I we don’t speciy anything to pass to the
container, then the -h is passed by the CMD instruction and returns the Nginx help
text: /usr/sbin/nginx -h.
This allows us to build in a deault command to execute when our container is run
combined with overridable options and ags on the docker run command line.
TIP I required at runtime, you can override the ENTRYPOINT instruction using
the docker run command with --entrypoint ag.
WORKDIR
The WORKDIR instruction provides a way to set the working directory or the con-
tainer and the ENTRYPOINT and/or CMD to be executed when a container is launched
rom the image.
We can use it to set the working directory or a series o instructions or or the
nal container. For example, to set the working directory or a specic instruction
we might:
WORKDIR /opt/webapp/db
RUN bundle install
WORKDIR /opt/webapp
ENTRYPOINT [ "rackup" ]
Here we’ve changed into the /opt/webapp/db directory to run bundle install
and then changed into the /opt/webapp directory prior to speciying our
ENTRYPOINT instruction o rackup.
You can override the working directory at runtime with the -w ag, or example:
ENV
The ENV instruction is used to set environment variables during the image build
process. For example:
This new environment variable will be used or any subsequent RUN instructions,
as i we had specied an environment variable prex to a command like so:
You can speciy single environment variables in an ENV instruction or since Docker
1.4 you can speciy multiple variables like so:
Here we’ve specied a new environment variable, TARGET_DIR, and then used its
value in a WORKDIR instruction. Our WORKDIR instruction would now be set to /opt
/app.
NOTE You can also escape environment variables when needed by prex-
ing them with a backslash.
These environment variables will also be persisted into any containers created
rom your image. So, i we were to run the env command in a container built
with the ENV RVM_PATH /home/rvm/ instruction we’d see:
root@bf42aadc7f09:~# env
. . .
RVM_PATH=/home/rvm/
. . .
You can also pass environment variables on the docker run command line using
the -e ag. These variables will only apply at runtime, or example:
Now our container has the WEB_PORT environment variable set to 8080.
USER
The USER instruction species a user that the image should be run as; or example:
USER nginx
This will cause containers created rom the image to be run by the nginx user. We
can speciy a username or a UID and group or GID. Or even a combination thereo,
or example:
USER user
USER user:group
USER uid
USER uid:gid
USER user:gid
USER uid:group
You can also override this at runtime by speciying the -u ag with the docker run
command.
TIP The deault user i you don’t speciy the USER instruction is root.
VOLUME
The VOLUME instruction adds volumes to any container created rom the image.
A volume is a specially designated directory within one or more containers that
bypasses the Union File System to provide several useul eatures or persistent or
shared data:
This allows us to add data (like source code), a database, or other content into an
image without committing it to the image and allows us to share that data between
containers. This can be used to do testing with containers and an application’s
code, manage logs, or handle databases inside a container. We’ll see examples o
this in Chapters 5 and 6.
You can use the VOLUME instruction like so:
VOLUME ["/opt/project"]
This would attempt to create a mount point /opt/project to any container created
rom the image.
TIP Also useul and related is the docker cp command. This allows you
to copy les to and rom your containers. You can read about it in the Docker
command line documentation.
TIP We’ll see a lot more about volumes and how to use them in Chapters 5
and 6. I you’re curious you can read more about volumes in the Docker volumes
documentation.
ADD
The ADD instruction adds les and directories rom our build environment into our
image; or example, when installing an application. The ADD instruction species
a source and a destination or the les, like so:
This ADD instruction will copy the le software.lic rom the build directory to /
opt/application/software.lic in the image. The source o the le can be a URL,
lename, or directory as long as it is inside the build context or environment. You
cannot ADD les rom outside the build directory or context.
When ADD’ing les Docker uses the ending character o the destination to deter-
mine what the source is. I the destination ends in a /, then it considers the source
a directory. I it doesn’t end in a /, it considers the source a le.
The source o the le can also be a URL; or example:
Lastly, the ADD instruction has some special magic or taking care o local tar
archives. I a tar archive (valid archive types include gzip, bzip2, xz) is specied
as the source le, then Docker will automatically unpack it or you:
This will unpack the latest.tar.gz archive into the /var/www/wordpress/ direc-
tory. The archive is unpacked with the same behavior as running tar with the
-x option: the output is the union o whatever exists in the destination plus the
contents o the archive. I a le or directory with the same name already exists in
the destination, it will not be overwritten.
WARNING Currently this will not work with a tar archive specied in a
URL. This is somewhat inconsistent behavior and may change in a uture release.
Finally, i the destination doesn’t exist, Docker will create the ull path or us,
including any directories. New les and directories will be created with a mode
o 0755 and a UID and GID o 0.
NOTE It’s also important to note that the build cache can be invalidated
by ADD instructions. I the les or directories added by an ADD instruction change
then this will invalidate the cache or all ollowing instructions in the Dockerfile.
COPY
The COPY instruction is closely related to the ADD instruction. The key diference
is that the COPY instruction is purely ocused on copying local les rom the build
context and does not have any extraction or decompression capabilities.
This will copy les rom the conf.d directory to the /etc/apache2/ directory.
The source o the les must be the path to a le or directory relative to the build
context, the local source directory in which your Dockerfile resides. You cannot
copy anything that is outside o this directory, because the build context is up-
loaded to the Docker daemon, and the copy takes place there. Anything outside
o the build context is not available. The destination should be an absolute path
inside the container.
Any les and directories created by the copy will have a UID and GID o 0.
I the source is a directory, the entire directory is copied, including lesystem
metadata; i the source is any other kind o le, it is copied individually along
with its metadata. In our example, the destination ends with a trailing slash /, so
it will be considered a directory and copied to the destination directory.
I the destination doesn’t exist, it is created along with all missing directories in
its path, much like how the mkdir -p command works.
LABEL
The LABEL instruction adds metadata to a Docker image. The metadata is in the
orm o key/value pairs. Let’s see an example.
LABEL version="1.0"
LABEL location="New York" type="Data Center" role="Web Server"
The LABEL instruction is written in the orm o label="value". You can speciy
one item o metadata per label or multiple items separated with white space. We
recommend combining all your metadata in a single LABEL instruction to save
creating multiple layers with each piece o metadata. You can inspect the labels
on an image using the docker inspect command..
"Labels": {
"version": "1.0",
"location": "New York",
"type": "Data Center",
"role": "Web Server"
},
Here we see the metadata we just dened using the LABEL instruction.
STOPSIGNAL
The STOPSIGNAL instruction instruction sets the system call signal that will be sent
to the container when you tell it to stop. This signal can be a valid number rom
the kernel syscall table, or instance 9, or a signal name in the ormat SIGNAME, or
instance SIGKILL.
ARG
The ARG instruction denes variables that can be passed at build-time via the
docker build command. This is done using the --build-arg ag. You can only
speciy build-time arguments that have been dened in the Dockerfile.
ARG build
ARG webapp_user=user
The second ARG instruction sets a deault, i no value is specied or the argument
at build-time then the deault is used. Let’s use one o these arguments in a docker
build now.
As the jamtur01/webapp image is built the build variable will be set to 1234 and
the webapp_user variable will inherit the deault value o user.
Docker has a set o predened ARG variables that you can use at build-time without
a corresponding ARG instruction in the Dockerfile.
HTTP_PROXY
http_proxy
HTTPS_PROXY
https_proxy
FTP_PROXY
ftp_proxy
NO_PROXY
no_proxy
To use these predened variables, pass them using the --build-arg <variable
>=<value> ag to the docker build command.
NOTE The ARG instruction was introduced in Docker 1.9 and you can read
more about it in the Docker documentation.
SHELL
The SHELL instruction allows the deault shell used or the shell orm o commands
to be overridden. The deault shell on Linux is ‘["/bin/sh", "-c"] and on Win-
dows is ["cmd", "/S", "/C"].
The SHELL instruction is useul on platorms such as Windows where there are
multiple shells, or example running commands in the cmd or powershell environ-
ments. Or when need to run a command on Linux in a specic shell, or example
Bash.
The SHELL instruction can be used multiple times. Each new SHELL instruction
overrides all previous SHELL instructions, and afects any subsequent instructions.
HEALTHCHECK
The HEALTHCHECK instruction tells Docker how to test a container to check that it
is still working correctly. This allows you to check things like a web site being
served or an API endpoint responding with the correct data, allowing you to iden-
tiy issues that appear, even i an underlying process still appears to be running
normally.
When a container has a health check specied, it has a health status in addition
to its normal status. You can speciy a health check like:
The HEALTHCHECK instruction contains options and then the command you wish to
run itsel, separated by a CMD keyword.
We’ve rst specied three deault options:
The command ater the CMD keyword can be either a shell command or an exec
array, or example as we’ve seen in the ENTRYPOINT instruction. The command
should exit with 0 to indicate health or 1 to indicate an unhealthy state. In our
CMD we’re executing curl on the localhost. I the command ails we’re exiting
with an exit code o 1, indicating an unhealthy state.
We can see the state o the health check using the docker inspect command.
The health check state and related data is stored in the .State.Health namespace
and includes current state as well as a history o previous checks and their output.
The output rom each health check is also available via docker inspect.
Here we’re iterating through the array o .Log entries in the docker inspect out-
put.
There can only be one HEALTHCHECK instruction in a Dockerfile. I you list more
than one then only the last will take efect.
You can also disable any health checks specied in any base images you may have
inherited with the instruction:
HEALTHCHECK NONE
ONBUILD
The ONBUILD instruction adds triggers to images. A trigger is executed when the
image is used as the basis o another image (e.g., i you have an image that needs
source code added rom a specic location that might not yet be available, or i
you need to execute a build script that is specic to the environment in which the
image is built).
The trigger inserts a new instruction in the build process, as i it were specied
right ater the FROM instruction. The trigger can be any build instruction. For
example:
This would add an ONBUILD trigger to the image being created, which we see when
we run docker inspect on the image.
For example, we’ll build a new Dockerfile or an Apache2 image that we’ll call
jamtur01/apache2.
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
RUN apt-get update; apt-get install -y apache2
ENV APACHE_RUN_USER www-data
ENV APACHE_RUN_GROUP www-data
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR /var/log/apache2
ONBUILD ADD . /var/www/
EXPOSE 80
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/sbin/apache2"]
CMD ["-D", "FOREGROUND"]
We now have an image with an ONBUILD instruction that uses the ADD instruction
to add the contents o the directory we’re building rom to the /var/www/ directory
in our image. This could readily be our generic web application template rom
which I build web applications.
Let’s try this now by building a new image called webapp rom the ollowing
Dockerfile:
FROM jamtur01/apache2
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV APPLICATION_NAME webapp
ENV ENVIRONMENT development
We see that straight ater the FROM instruction, Docker has inserted the ADD in-
struction, specied by the ONBUILD trigger, and then proceeded to execute the
remaining steps. This would allow me to always add the local source and, as I’ve
done here, speciy some conguration or build inormation or each application;
hence, this becomes a useul template image.
The ONBUILD triggers are executed in the order specied in the parent image and
are only inherited once (i.e., by children and not grandchildren). I we built an-
other image rom this new image, a grandchild o the jamtur01/apache2 image,
then the triggers would not be executed when that image is built.
NOTE There are several instructions you can’t ONBUILD: FROM, MAINTAINER,
and ONBUILD itsel. This is done to prevent Inception-like recursion in Dockerfile
builds.
Once we’ve got an image, we can upload it to the Docker Hub. This allows us to
make it available or others to use. For example, we could share it with others in
our organization or make it publicly available.
NOTE The Docker Hub also has the option o private repositories. These
are a paid-or eature that allows you to store an image in a private repository
that is only available to you or anyone with whom you share it. This allows you
to have private images containing proprietary inormation or code you might not
want to share publicly.
We push images to the Docker Hub using the docker push command.
Let’s build an image without a user prex and try and push it now.
$ cd static_web
$ sudo docker build --no-cache -t="static_web" .
. . .
Successfully built a312a2ed58c7
$ sudo docker push static_web
The push refers to a repository [docker.io/library/static_web]
c0121fc36460: Preparing
8591faa9900d: Preparing
9a39129ae0ac: Preparing
98305c1a8f5e: Preparing
0185b3091e8e: Preparing
ea9f151abb7e: Waiting
unauthorized: authentication required
What’s gone wrong here? We’ve tried to push our image to the repository
static_web, but Docker knows this is a root repository. Root repositories are
managed only by the Docker, Inc., team and will reject our attempt to write to
them as unauthorized. Let’s try again.
This time, our push has worked, and we’ve written to a user repository, jamtur01
/static_web. We would write to your own user ID, which we created earlier, and
to an appropriately named image (e.g., youruser/yourimage).
We can now see our uploaded image on the Docker Hub.
TIP You can nd documentation and more inormation on the eatures o
the Docker Hub here.
Automated Builds
In addition to being able to build and push our images rom the command line,
the Docker Hub also allows us to dene Automated Builds. We can do so by con-
necting a GitHub or BitBucket repository containing a Dockerfile to the Docker
Hub. When we push to this repository, an image build will be triggered and a new
image created. This was previously also known as a Trusted Build.
NOTE Automated Builds also work or private GitHub and BitBucket repos-
itories.
The rst step in adding an Automated Build to the Docker Hub is to connect your
GitHub account or BitBucket to your Docker Hub account. To do this, navigate to
Docker Hub, sign in, click on your prole link, then click the Create -> Create
Automated Build button.
You will see a page that shows your options or linking to either GitHub or Bit-
Bucket. Click the Select button under the GitHub logo to initiate the account
linkage. You will be taken to GitHub and asked to authorize access or Docker
Hub.
On Github you have two options: Public and Private (recommended) and
Limited. Select Public and Private (recommended), and click Allow Access
to complete the authorization. You may be prompted to input your GitHub
password to conrm the access.
From here, you will be prompted to select the organization and repository rom
which you want to construct an Automated Build.
Select the repository rom which you wish to create an Automated Build and then
congure the build.
Speciy the deault branch you wish to use, and conrm the repository name.
Speciy a tag you wish to apply to any resulting build, then speciy the location o
the Dockerfile. The deault is assumed to be the root o the repository, but you
can override this with any path.
Finally, click the Create button to add your Automated Build to the Docker Hub.
You will now see your Automated Build submitted. Click on the Build Details
link to see the status o the last build, including log output showing the build
process and any errors. A build status o Done indicates the Automated Build is
up to date. An Error status indicates a problem; you can click through to see the
log output.
NOTE You can’t push to an Automated Build using the docker push com-
mand. You can only update it by pushing updates to your GitHub or BitBucket
repository.
Deleting an image
We can also delete images when we don’t need them anymore. To do this, we’ll
use the docker rmi command.
Here we’ve deleted the jamtur01/static_web image. You can see Docker’s layer
lesystem at work here: each o the Deleted: lines represents an image layer
being deleted. I a running container is still using an image then you won’t be
able to delete it. You’ll need to stop all containers running that image, remove
them and then delete the image.
NOTE This only deletes the image locally. I you’ve previously pushed
that image to the Docker Hub, it’ll still exist there.
I you want to delete an image’s repository on the Docker Hub, you’ll need to sign
in and delete it there using the Settings -> Delete button.
We can also delete more than one image by speciying a list on the command line.
or, like the docker rm command cheat we saw in Chapter 3, we can do the same
with the docker rmi command:
The team at Docker, Inc., have open-sourced the code they use to run a Docker
registry, thus allowing us to build our own internal registry. The registry does not
currently have a user interace and is only made available as an API service.
TIP I you’re running Docker behind a proxy or corporate rewall you can
also use the HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, NO_PROXY options to control how Docker
connects.
Installing a registry rom a Docker container is simple. Just run the Docker-
provided container like so:
This will launch a container running version 2.0 o the registry application and
bind port 5000 to the local host.
TIP I you’re running an older version o the Docker Registry, prior to 2.0,
you can use the Migrator tool to upgrade to a new registry.
So how can we make use o our new registry? Let’s see i we can upload one o
our existing images, the jamtur01/static_web image, to our new registry. First,
let’s identiy the image’s ID using the docker images command.
Next we take our image ID, 22d47c8cb6e5, and tag it or our new registry. To
speciy the new registry destination, we prex the image name with the hostname
and port o our new registry. In our case, our new registry has a hostname o
docker.example.com.
Ater tagging our image, we can then push it to the new registry using the docker
push command:
The image is then posted in the local registry and available or us to build new
containers using the docker run command.
This is the simplest deployment o the Docker registry behind your rewall. It
doesn’t explain how to congure the registry or manage it. To nd out details
like conguring authentication, how to manage the backend storage or your im-
ages and how to manage your registry see the ull conguration and deployments
details in the Docker Registry deployment documentation.
Alternative Indexes
There are a variety o other services and companies out there starting to provide
custom Docker registry services.
Quay
The Quay service provides a private hosted registry that allows you to upload both
public and private containers. Unlimited public repositories are currently ree.
Private repositories are available in a series o scaled plans. The Quay product
has recently been acquired by CoreOS and will be integrated into that product.
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve seen how to use and interact with Docker images and the
basics o modiying, updating, and uploading images to the Docker Hub. We’ve
also learned about using a Dockerfile to construct our own custom images. Fi-
nally, we’ve discovered how to run our own local Docker registry and some hosted
alternatives. This gives us the basis or starting to build services with Docker.
We’ll use this knowledge in the next chapter to see how we can integrate Docker
into a testing workow and into a Continuous Integration liecycle.
We’ve learned a lot about the basics o Docker in the previous chapters. We’ve
learned about images, the basics o launching, and working with containers. Now
that we’ve got those basics down, let’s try to use Docker in earnest. We’re going
to start by using Docker to help us make our development and testing processes a
bit more streamlined and ecient.
To demonstrate this, we’re going to look at three use cases:
NOTE We’re using Jenkins or CI because it’s the platorm I have the most
experience with, but you can adapt most o the ideas contained in those sections
to any CI platorm.
In the rst two use cases, we’re going to ocus on local, developer-centric devel-
oping and testing, and in the last use case, we’ll see how Docker might be used in
a broader multi-developer liecycle or build and test.
138
Chapter 5: Testing with Docker
This chapter will introduce you to using Docker as part o your daily lie and work-
ow, including useul concepts like connecting Docker containers. The chapter
contains a lot o useul inormation on how to run and manage Docker in general,
and I recommend you read it even i these use cases aren’t immediately relevant
to you.
One o the simplest use cases or Docker is as a local web development environ-
ment. Such an environment allows you to replicate your production environment
and ensure what you develop will also likely run in production. We’re going to
start with installing the Nginx web server into a container to run a simple website.
Our website is originally named Sample.
To do this, let’s start with creating some structure, some conguration les or our
container and a Dockerfile rom which to build our image. We start by creating
a directory to hold our Dockerfile rst.
$ mkdir sample
$ cd sample
We’re also going to need some Nginx conguration les to run our website. We can
download some example les I’ve prepared earlier rom GitHub into the sample
directory.
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamtur01/dockerbook-code
/master/code/5/sample/nginx/global.conf
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamtur01/dockerbook-code
/master/code/5/sample/nginx/nginx.conf
Now let’s look at the Dockerfile you’re going to create or our Sample website.
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
RUN apt-get -yqq update; apt-get -yqq install nginx
RUN mkdir -p /var/www/html/website
ADD global.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/
ADD nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
EXPOSE 80
• Installs Nginx.
• Creates a directory, /var/www/html/website/, in the container.
• Adds the Nginx conguration rom the local les we downloaded to our
image.
• Exposes port 80 on the image.
Our two Nginx conguration les congure Nginx or running our Sample website.
The global.conf le is copied into the /etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory by the ADD
instruction. The global.conf conguration le species:
server {
listen 0.0.0.0:80;
server_name _;
root /var/www/html/website;
index index.html index.htm;
access_log /var/log/nginx/default_access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/default_error.log;
}
This sets Nginx to listen on port 80 and sets the root o our webserver to /var/www
/html/website, the directory we just created with a RUN instruction.
user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
daemon off;
events { }
http {
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
types_hash_max_size 2048;
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}
In this conguration le, the daemon off; option stops Nginx rom going into
the background and orces it to run in the oreground. This is because Docker
containers rely on the running process inside them to remain active. By deault,
Nginx daemonizes itsel when started, which would cause the container to run
briey and then stop when the daemon was orked and launched and the original
process that orked it stopped.
This le is copied to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf by the ADD instruction.
You’ll also see a subtle diference between the destinations o the two ADD instruc-
tions. The rst ends in the directory, /etc/nginx/conf.d/, and the second in a
specic le /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Both styles are accepted ways o copying
les into a Docker image.
NOTE You can nd all the code and sample conguration les or this at
The Docker Book Code site or the Docker Book site. You will need to specically
download or copy and paste the nginx.conf and global.conf conguration les
into the nginx directory we created to make them available or the docker build.
From this Dockerfile, we can build ourselves a new image with the docker build
command; we’ll call it jamtur01/nginx.
This will build and name our new image, and you should see the build steps
execute. We can take a look at the steps and layers that make up our new image
using the docker history command.
The history starts with the nal layer, our new jamtur01/nginx image and works
backward to the original parent image, ubuntu:16.04. Each step in between shows
the new layer and the instruction rom the Dockerfile that generated it.
We can now take our jamtur01/nginx image and start to build containers rom it,
which will allow us to test our Sample website. To do that we need to add the
Sample website’s code. Let’s download it now into the sample directory.
This will create a directory called website inside the sample directory. We then
download an index.html le or our Sample website into that website directory.
Now let’s look at how we might run a container using the docker run command.
NOTE You can see we’ve passed the nginx command to docker run. Nor-
mally this wouldn’t make Nginx run interactively. In the conguration we sup-
plied to Docker, though, we’ve added the directive daemon off. This directive
causes Nginx to run interactively in the oreground when launched.
You can see we’ve used the docker run command to build a container rom our
jamtur01/nginx image called website. You will have seen most o the options
beore, but the -v option is new. This new option allows us to create a volume in
our container rom a directory on the host.
Let’s take a brie digression into volumes, as they are important and useul in
Docker. Volumes are specially designated directories within one or more contain-
ers that bypass the layered Union File System to provide persistent or shared data
or Docker. This means that changes to a volume are made directly and bypass
the image. They will not be included when we commit or build an image.
TIP Volumes can also be shared between containers and can persist even
when containers are stopped. We’ll see how to make use o this or data manage-
ment in later chapters.
In our immediate case, we see the value o volumes when we don’t want to bake
our application or code into an image. For example:
The -v option works by speciying a directory or mount on the local host separated
rom the directory on the container with a :. I the container directory doesn’t
exist Docker will create it.
We can also speciy the read/write status o the container directory by adding
either rw or ro ater that directory, like so:
TIP The website directory we’re using is contained in the source code or this
book here and on GitHub here. You can see the index.html le we downloaded
inside that directory.
Now, i we look at our running container using the docker ps command, we see
that it is active, it is named website, and port 80 on the container is mapped to
port 49161 on the host.
$ sudo docker ps -l
CONTAINER ID IMAGE ... PORTS NAMES
6751b94bb5c0 jamtur01/nginx:latest ... 0.0.0.0:49161->80/tcp
website
I we browse to port 49161 on our Docker host, we’ll be able to see our Sample
website displayed.
Neat! We’ve got a live site. Now what happens i we edit our website? Let’s open
up the index.html le in the sample/website older on our local host and edit it.
$ cd sample
$ vi $PWD/website/index.html
To:
Let’s reresh our browser and see what we’ve got now.
We see that our Sample website has been updated. This is a simple example
o editing a website, but you can see how you could easily do so much more.
More importantly, you’re testing a site that reects production reality. You can
now have containers or each type o production web-serving environment (e.g.,
Apache, Nginx), or running varying versions o development rameworks like
PHP or Ruby on Rails, or or database back ends, etc.
Now let’s look at a more complex example o testing a larger web application.
We’re going to test a Sinatra-based web application instead o a static website
and then develop that application whilst testing in Docker. Sinatra is a Ruby-
based web application ramework. It contains a web application library and a
simple Domain Specic Language or DSL or creating web applications. Unlike
more complex web application rameworks, like Ruby on Rails, Sinatra does not
ollow the model–view–controller pattern but rather allows you to create quick
and simple web applications.
As such it’s perect or creating a small sample application to test. In our case our
new application is going to take incoming URL parameters and output them as a
JSON hash. We’re also going to take advantage o this application architecture to
show you how to link Docker containers together.
Let’s create a directory, sinatra, to hold our new application and any associated
les we’ll need or the build.
$ mkdir -p sinatra
$ cd sinatra
Inside the sinatra directory let’s start with a Dockerfile to build the basic image
that we will use to develop our Sinatra web application.
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
RUN apt-get update -yqq; apt-get -yqq install ruby ruby-dev build
-essential redis-tools
RUN gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri sinatra json redis
EXPOSE 4567
CMD [ "/opt/webapp/bin/webapp" ]
You can see that we’ve created another Ubuntu-based image, installed Ruby and
RubyGems, and then used the gem binary to install the sinatra, json, and redis
gems. The sinatra and json gems contain Ruby’s Sinatra library and support or
JSON. The redis gem we’re going to use a little later on to provide integration to
a Redis database.
We’ve also created a directory to hold our new web application and exposed the
deault WEBrick port o 4567.
Finally, we’ve specied a CMD o /opt/webapp/bin/webapp, which will be the bi-
nary that launches our web application.
Let’s build this new image now using the docker build command.
We’ve built our image. Let’s now download our Sinatra web application’s source
code. You can nd the code or this Sinatra application here or at The Docker
Book site. The application is made up o the bin and lib directories rom the
webapp directory.
Let’s download it now into the sinatra directory.
$ cd sinatra
$ wget --cut-dirs=3 -nH -r --reject Dockerfile,index.html --no-
parent http://dockerbook.com/code/5/sinatra/webapp/
Let’s quickly look at the core o the webapp source code contained in the sinatra
/webapp/lib/app.rb le.
require "rubygems"
require "sinatra"
require "json"
get '/' do
"<h1>DockerBook Test Sinatra app</h1>"
end
post '/json/?' do
params.to_json
end
end
This is a simple application that converts any parameters posted to the /json
endpoint to JSON and displays them.
We also need to ensure that the webapp/bin/webapp binary is executable prior to
using it using the chmod command.
$ chmod +x webapp/bin/webapp
Now let’s launch a new container rom our image using the docker run command.
To launch we should be inside the sinatra directory because we’re going to mount
Here we’ve launched a new container rom our jamtur01/sinatra image, called
webapp. We’ve specied a new volume, using the webapp directory that holds our
new Sinatra web application, and we’ve mounted it to the directory we created in
the Dockerfile: /opt/webapp.
We’ve not provided a command to run on the command line; instead, we’re using
the command we specied via the CMD instruction in the Dockerfile o the image.
. . .
CMD [ "/opt/webapp/bin/webapp" ]
. . .
This command will be executed when a container is launched rom this image.
We can also use the docker logs command to see what happened when our com-
mand was executed.
By adding the -f ag to the docker logs command, you can get similar behavior
to the tail -f command and continuously stream new output rom the STDERR
and STDOUT o the container.
We can also see the running processes o our Sinatra Docker container using the
docker top command.
We see rom the logs that Sinatra has been launched and the WEBrick server is
waiting on port 4567 in the container or us to test our application. Let’s check to
which port on our local host that port is mapped:
Right now, our basic Sinatra application doesn’t do much. It just takes incoming
parameters, turns them into JSON, and then outputs them. We can now use the
curl command to test our application.
We see that we’ve passed some URL parameters to our Sinatra application and
returned to us as a JSON hash: {"name":"Foo","status":"Bar"}.
Neat! But let’s see i we can extend our example application container to an actual
application stack by connecting to a service running in another container.
We’re going to extend our Sinatra application now by adding a Redis back end
and storing our incoming URL parameters in a Redis database. To do this, we’re
going to download a new version o our Sinatra application. We’ll also create an
image and container that run a Redis database. We’ll then make use o Docker’s
capabilities to connect the two containers.
$ cd sinatra
$ wget --cut-dirs=3 -nH -r --reject Dockerfile,index.html --no-
parent http://dockerbook.com/code/5/sinatra/webapp_redis/
We see we’ve downloaded the new application. Let’s look at its core code in lib/
app.rb now.
require "rubygems"
require "sinatra"
require "json"
require "redis"
get '/' do
"<h1>DockerBook Test Redis-enabled Sinatra app</h1>"
end
get '/json' do
params = redis.get "params"
params.to_json
end
post '/json/?' do
redis.set "params", [params].to_json
params.to_json
end
end
NOTE You can see the ull source or our updated Redis-enabled Sinatra
application here or at The Docker Book site.
Our new application is basically the same as our previous application with support
or Redis added. We now create a connection to a Redis database on a host called
db on port 6379. We also post our parameters to that Redis database and then get
them back rom it when required.
We also need to ensure that the webapp_redis/bin/webapp binary is executable
prior to using it using the chmod command.
$ chmod +x webapp_redis/bin/webapp
To build our Redis database, we’re going to create a new image. Let’s create a
directory, redis inside our sinatra directory, to hold any associated les we’ll
need or the Redis container build.
$ mkdir redis
$ cd redis
Inside the sinatra/redis directory let’s start with another Dockerfile or our
Redis image.
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
RUN apt-get -yqq update; apt-get -yqq install redis-server redis-
tools
EXPOSE 6379
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/redis-server", "--protected-mode no" ]
CMD []
We’ve specied the installation o the Redis server, exposed port 6379, and speci-
ed an ENTRYPOINT that will launch that Redis server. Let’s now build that image
and call it jamtur01/redis.
We’ve launched a new container named redis rom our jamtur01/redis image.
Note that we’ve specied the -p ag to publish port 6379. Let’s see what port it’s
running on.
Our Redis port is published on port 49161. Let’s try to connect to that Redis
instance now.
We’ll need to install the Redis client locally to do the test. This is usually the
redis-tools package on Ubuntu.
Then we can use the redis-cli command to check our Redis server.
Here we’ve connected the Redis client to 127.0.0.1 on port 49161 and veried
that our Redis server is working. You can use the quit command to exit the Redis
CLI interace.
Let’s now update our Sinatra application to connect to Redis and store our incom-
ing parameters. In order to do that, we’re going to need to be able to talk to the
Redis server. There are two ways we could do this using:
So which method should I choose? Well the rst method, Docker’s internal net-
work, is not an overly exible or powerul solution. We’re mostly going to discuss
it to introduce you to how Docker networking unctions. We don’t recommend it
as a solution or connecting containers.
The more realistic method or connecting containers is Docker Networking.
We’re going to look Docker Networking or connecting Docker containers together
in the ollowing sections.
The rst method involves Docker’s own network stack. So ar, we’ve seen Docker
containers exposing ports and binding interaces so that container services are
published on the local Docker host’s external network (e.g., binding port 80 inside
a container to a high port on the local host). In addition to this capability, Docker
has a acet we haven’t yet seen: internal networking.
Every Docker container is assigned an IP address, provided through an interace
created when we installed Docker. That interace is called docker0. Let’s look at
that interace on our Docker host now.
TIP Since Docker 1.5.0 IPv6 addresses are also supported. To enable this run
the Docker daemon with the --ipv6 ag.
$ ip a show docker0
4: docker0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc
noqueue state UP
link/ether 06:41:69:71:00:ba brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 172.17.42.1/16 scope global docker0
inet6 fe80::1cb3:6eff:fee2:2df1/64 scope link
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
. . .
NOTE Depending on your distribution, you may need the iproute2 pack-
age to run the ip command.
The docker0 interace is a virtual Ethernet bridge that connects our containers and
the local host network. I we look urther at the other interaces on our Docker
host, we’ll nd a series o interaces starting with veth.
Every time Docker creates a container, it creates a pair o peer interaces that are
like opposite ends o a pipe (i.e., a packet sent on one will be received on the
other). It gives one o the peers to the container to become its eth0 interace and
keeps the other peer, with a unique name like vethec6a, out on the host machine.
You can think o a veth interace as one end o a virtual network cable. One end is
plugged into the docker0 bridge, and the other end is plugged into the container.
By binding every veth* interace to the docker0 bridge, Docker creates a virtual
subnet shared between the host machine and every Docker container.
Let’s look inside a container now and see the other end o this pipe.
We see that Docker has assigned an IP address, 172.17.0.29, or our container that
will be peered with a virtual interace on the host side, allowing communication
between the host network and the container.
Let’s trace a route out o our container and see this now.
We see that the next hop rom our container is the docker0 interace gateway IP
172.17.42.1 on the host network.
But there’s one other piece o Docker networking that enables this connectivity:
rewall rules and NAT conguration allow Docker to route between containers
and the host network.
Exit out o our container and let’s look at the IPTables NAT conguration on our
Docker host.
Here we have several interesting IPTables rules. Firstly, we can note that there
is no deault access into our containers. We specically have to open up ports to
communicate to them rom the host network. We see one example o this in the
DNAT, or destination NAT, rule that routes trac rom our container to port 49161
on the Docker host.
TIP To learn more about advanced networking conguration or Docker, this
guide is useul.
Let’s examine our new Redis container and see its networking conguration using
the docker inspect command.
The docker inspect command shows the details o a Docker container, including
its conguration and networking. We’ve truncated much o this inormation in
the example above and only shown the networking conguration. We could also
use the -f ag to only acquire the IP address.
Using the results o the docker inspect command we see that the container has an
IP address o 172.17.0.18 and uses the gateway address o the docker0 interace.
We can also see that the 6379 port is mapped to port 49161 on the local host, but,
because we’re on the local Docker host, we don’t have to use that port mapping.
We can instead use the 172.17.0.18 address to communicate with the Redis server
on port 6379 directly.
$ redis-cli -h 172.17.0.18
redis 172.17.0.18:6379>
Once you’ve conrmed the connection is working you can exit the Redis interace
using the quit command.
So, while this initially looks like it might be a good solution or connecting our
containers together, sadly, this approach has two big rough edges: Firstly, we’d
need to hard-code the IP address o our Redis container into our applications.
Secondly, i we restart the container, Docker changes the IP address. Let’s see this
now using the docker restart command (we’ll get the same result i we kill our
container using the docker kill command).
We see that our new Redis container has a new IP address, 172.17.0.19, which
means that i we’d hard-coded our Sinatra application, it would no longer be able
to connect to the Redis database. That’s not helpul.
Since Docker 1.9, Docker’s networking has become a lot more exible. Let’s look
at how we might connect our containers with this new networking ramework.
Docker networking
Container connections are created using networks. This is called Docker Network-
ing and was introduced in the Docker 1.9 release. Docker Networking allows
you to setup your own networks through which containers can communicate. Es-
sentially this supplements the existing docker0 network with new, user managed
networks. Importantly, containers can now communicate with each across hosts
and your networking conguration can be highly customizable. Networking also
integrates with Docker Compose and Swarm, we’ll see more o both in Chapter 7.
NOTE The networking support is also pluggable, meaning you can add
network drivers to support specic topologies and networking rameworks rom
To use Docker networks we rst need to create a network and then launch a
container inside that network.
This uses the docker network command to create a bridge network called app. A
network ID is returned or the network.
We can then inspect this network using the docker network inspect command.
Our new network is a local, bridged network much like our docker0 network and
that currently no containers are running inside the network.
TIP In addition to bridge networks, which exist on a single host, we can also
create overlay networks, which allow us to span multiple hosts. You can read
more about overlay networks in the Docker multi-host network documentation.
You can list all current networks using the docker network ls command.
And you can remove a network using the docker network rm command.
Let’s add some containers to our network, starting with a Redis container.
Here we’ve run a new container called db using our jamtur01/redis image. We’ve
also specied a new ag: --net. The --net ag species a network to run our
container inside.
Now i we re-run our docker network inspect command we’ll see quite a lot
more inormation.
Now, inside our network, we see a container with a MAC address and an IP address,
172.18.0.2.
Now let’s add a container to the network we’ve created. To do this we need to be
back in the sinatra directory.
$ cd sinatra
$ sudo docker run -p 4567 \
--net=app --name network_test -t -i \
jamtur01/sinatra /bin/bash
root@305c5f27dbd1:/#
We’ve launched a container named network_test inside the app network. We’ve
launched it interactively so we can peek inside to see what’s happening.
As the container has been started inside the app network, Docker will have taken
note o all other containers running inside that network and populated their ad-
dresses in local DNS. Let’s see this now in the network_test container.
We rst need the dnsutils and iputils-ping packages to get the nslookup and
ping binaries respectively.
root@305c5f27dbd1:/# nslookup db
Server: 127.0.0.11
Address:127.0.0.11#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: db
Address: 172.18.0.2
We see that using the nslookup command to resolve the db container it returns
the IP address: 172.18.0.2. A Docker network will also add the app network as
a domain sux or the network, any host in the app network can be resolved by
hostname.app, here db.app. Let’s try that now.
In our case we just need the db entry to make our application unction. To make
that work our webapp’s Redis connection code already uses the db hostname.
We could now start our application and have our Sinatra application write its
variables into Redis via the connection between the db and webapp containers that
we’ve established via the app network.
Let’s try it now by exiting the network_test container and starting up a new con-
tainer running our Redis-enabled web application.
Here we’ve launched a new container called webapp_redis running our Redis-
enabled web application. Now let’s just check, on the Docker host, what port our
Sinatra container has bound the application.
Okay port 4567 in the container is bound to port 49162 on the Docker host. Let’s
use this inormation to test our application rom the Docker host using the curl
command.
And now let’s conrm that our Redis instance has received the update by querying
the Sinatra web application in webapp_redis.
$ curl -i http://localhost:49162/json
"[{\"name\":\"Foo\",\"status\":\"Bar\"}]"
Here we’ve connected to our application, which has connected to Redis, checked
a list o keys to nd that we have a key called params, and then queried that key
to see that our parameters (name=Foo and status=Bar) have both been stored in
Redis. Our application works!
You can also add already running containers to existing networks using the docker
network connect command. So we can add an existing container to our app
network. Let’s say we have an existing container called db2 that also runs Redis.
Let’s add that to the app network (we could have also used the --net ag to
automatically add the container to the network at runtime).
. . .
"Name": "db2"
"EndpointID": "47
faec311dfac22f2ee8c1b874b87ce8987ee65505251366d4b9db422a749a1e"
,
"MacAddress": "02:42:ac:12:00:04",
"IPv4Address": "172.18.0.4/16",
"IPv6Address": ""
}
},
. . .
We can also disconnect a container rom a network using the docker network
disconnect command.
This would remove the db2 container rom the app network.
Containers can belong to multiple networks at once so you can create quite com-
plex networking models.
We’ve now seen all the ways Docker can connect containers together. You can see
that it is easy to create a ully unctional web application stack consisting o:
You should also be able to see how easy it would be to extend this concept to pro-
vide any number o applications stacks and manage complex local development
with them, like:
This way you can build, replicate, and iterate on production applications, even
complex multi-tier applications, in your local environment.
Up until now, all our testing examples have been local, single developer-centric
examples (i.e., how a local developer might make use o Docker to test a local web-
site or application). Let’s look at using Docker’s capabilities in a multi-developer
continuous integration testing scenario.
Docker excels at quickly generating and disposing o one or multiple containers.
There’s an obvious synergy with Docker’s capabilities and the concept o contin-
uous integration testing. Oten in a testing scenario you need to install sotware
or deploy multiple hosts requently, run your tests, and then clean up the hosts to
be ready to run again.
In a continuous integration environment, you might need these installation steps
and hosts multiple times a day. This adds a considerable build and conguration
overhead to your testing liecycle. Package and installation steps can also be time-
consuming and annoying, especially i requirements change requently or steps
require complex or time-consuming processes to clean up or revert.
Docker makes the deployment and cleanup o these steps and hosts cheap. To
demonstrate this, we’re going to build a testing pipeline in stages using Jenkins
CI: Firstly, we’re going to build a Jenkins server in Docker that runs other Docker
containers.
Once we’ve got Jenkins running, we’ll demonstrate a basic single-container test
run. Finally, we’ll look at a multi-container test scenario.
To provide our Jenkins server, we’re going to build an image rom a Dockerfile
that both installs Jenkins and Docker.
FROM jenkins
MAINTAINER [email protected]
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
USER root
RUN apt-get -qqy update; apt-get install -qqy sudo
RUN echo "jenkins ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers
RUN wget http://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-latest.
tgz
RUN tar -xvzf docker-latest.tgz
RUN mv docker/* /usr/bin/
USER jenkins
RUN /usr/local/bin/install-plugins.sh junit git git-client ssh-
slaves greenballs chucknorris ws-cleanup
We see that our Dockerfile inherits rom the jenkins image. The jenkins image
is the ocial Jenkins image maintained by their community on the Docker Hub.
The Dockerfile then does a lot o other stuf. Indeed, it is probably the most
complex Dockerfile we’ve seen so ar. Let’s walk through what it does.
We’ve rst set the USER to root, installed the sudo package and allowed the
jenkins user to make use o sudo. We then installed the Docker binary. We’ll
use this to connect to our Docker host and run containers or our builds.
Next we switch back to the jenkins user. This user is the deault or the jenkins
image and is required or containers launched rom the image to run Jenkins
correctly. We then use a RUN instruction to execute the install-plugins.sh com-
mand to install a list o Jenkins plugins we’re going to use.
Next, let’s create a directory, /var/jenkins_home, to hold our Jenkin’s congura-
tion. This means every time we restart Jenkins we won’t lose our conguration.
TIP Another approach would be to use Docker data volumes, which we’ll
discuss urther in Chapter 6.
TIP I you’re running this example on OS X you might need to create the
directory at /private/var/jenkins_home.
We also set the ownership o the jenkins_home directory to 1000, which is the UID
o the jenkins user inside the image we’re about to build. This will allow Jenkins
to write into this directory and store our Jenkins conguration.
Now that we have our Dockerfile and our Jenkins home directory, let’s build a
new image using the docker build command.
We can see that we’ve used the -p ag to publish port 8080 on port 8080 on the
local host, which would normally be poor practice, but we’re only going to run
one Jenkins server. We’ve also bound port 50000 on port 50000 which will be used
by the Jenkins build API.
Next, we bind two volumes using the -v ag. The rst mounts our /var/
jenkins_home directory into the container at /var/jenkins_home. This will
contain Jenkin’s conguration data and allow us to perpetuate its state across
container launches.
The second volume mounts /var/run/docker.sock, the socket or Docker’s dae-
mon into the Docker container. This will allow us to run Docker containers rom
inside our Jenkins container.
the Jenkins container you give the container access to the underlying Docker host.
This is not overly secure. I recommend you only do this i you are comortable
that the Jenkins container, any other containers on that Docker host are at a
comparable security level.
We see that our new container, jenkins, has been started. Let’s check out its logs.
. . .
*************************************************************
*************************************************************
*************************************************************
e9eef9d4a4e44741b0368877a9efb17c
*************************************************************
*************************************************************
*************************************************************
. . .
You can keep checking the logs, or run docker logs with the -f ag, until you
see a message similar to:
Finally, our Jenkins server should now be available in your browser on port 8080,
as we see here:
Put in the admin password generated during installation and click the Continue
button.
This will initiate the Jenkins Getting Started workow. You can ollow it or
cancel it by clicking the X in the top right o the dialogue.
I you cancel the Getting Started dialogue you’ll also skip creating any users. To
log into Jenkins again we would use a user name o admin and our initial admin
password.
Let’s name our new job Docker_test_job, select a job type o Freestyle project,
and click OK to continue to the next screen.
Now let’s ll in a ew sections. We’ll start with a description o the job. Then
click the Advanced. . . button, tick the Use Custom workspace radio button, and
speciy /var/jenkins_home/jobs/${JOB_NAME}/workspace as the Directory. This
is the workspace in which our Jenkins job is going to run. It’s also stored in our
Jenkins home directory to ensure we maintain state across builds.
Under Source Code Management, select Git and speciy the ollowing test reposi-
tory: https://github.com/turnbullpress/docker-jenkins-sample.git. This is
a simple repository containing some Ruby-based RSpec tests.
Now we’ll scroll down and update a ew more elds. First, we’ll add a build step
by clicking the Add Build Step button and selecting Execute shell. Let’s speciy
this shell script that will launch our tests and Docker.
# Exit with the same value as that with which the process exited.
exit $RC
So what does this script do? Firstly, it will create a new Docker image using a
Dockerfile contained in the Git repository we’ve just specied. This Dockerfile
provides the test environment in which we wish to execute. Let’s take a quick
look at it now.
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install ruby rake
RUN gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri rspec ci_reporter_rspec
TIP I we add a new dependency or require another package to run our tests,
all we’ll need to do is update this Dockerfile with the new requirements, and the
image will be automatically rebuilt when the tests are run.
Here we’re building an Ubuntu host, installing Ruby and RubyGems, and then
installing two gems: rspec and ci_reporter_rspec. This will build an image that
we can test using a typical Ruby-based application that relies on the RSpec test
ramework. The ci_reporter_rspec gem allows RSpec output to be converted
to JUnit-ormatted XML that Jenkins can consume. We’ll see the results o this
conversion shortly.
Back to our script. We’re building an image rom this Dockerfile. Next, we’re
creating a new environment variable called $MNT using the $WORKSPACE variable.
This is a variable, created by Jenkins, holding the workspace directory we dened
earlier in our job. This is where our Git repository containing the code we want
to test is going to be checked out to, and it is this directory we’re going to mount
into our Docker container. We can then execute our tests rom this checkout.
Next we create a container rom our image and run the tests. Inside this container,
we’ve mounted our workspace via a volume to the /opt/project directory. When
the container runs, we’re executing a command that changes into this directory
tree and executes the rake spec command, which actually runs our RSpec tests.
Now we’ve got a started container and we’ve grabbed the container ID.
TIP Docker also comes with a command line option called --cidfile that
captures the container’s ID and stores it in a le specied in the --cidfile options,
like so: --cidfile=/tmp/containerid.txt
Whilst the container is running, we want to attach to that container to get the
output rom it using the docker attach command. and then use the docker wait
command. This will echo the test output into our Jenkins job. Finally, the docker
wait command blocks until the command the container is executing nishes and
then returns the exit code o the container. The RC variable captures the exit code
rom the container when it completes.
Finally, we clean up and delete the container we’ve just created and exit with the
container’s exit code. This should be the exit code o our test run. Jenkins relies
on this exit code to tell it i a job’s tests have run successully or ailed.
Next we click the Add post-build action and add Publish JUnit test result
report. In the Test report XMLs, we need to speciy spec/reports/*.xml; this
is the location o the ci_reporter gem’s XML output, and locating it will allow
Jenkins to consume our test history and output.
Finally, we must click the Save button to save our new job.
We now have our Jenkins job, so let’s run it. We’ll do this by clicking the Build
Now button; a job will appear in the Build History box.
NOTE The rst time the tests run, it’ll take a little longer because Docker
is building our new image. The next time you run the tests, however, it’ll be much
aster, as Docker will already have the required image prepared.
We’ll click on this job to get details o the test run we’re executing.
We can click on Console Output to see the commands that have been executed as
part o the job.
We see that Jenkins has downloaded our Git repository to the workspace. We can
then execute our Shell script and build a Docker image using the docker build
command. Then, we’ll capture the image ID and use it to build a new container
using the docker run command. Running this new container executes the RSpec
tests and captures the results o the tests and the exit code. I the job exits with
an exit code o 0, then the job will be marked as successul.
You can also view the precise test results by clicking the Test Result link. This
will have captured the RSpec output o our tests in JUnit orm. This is the output
that the ci_reporter gem produces and our Ater Build step captures.
We can also automate our Jenkins job urther by enabling SCM polling, which
triggers automatic builds when new commits are made to the repository. Similar
automation can be achieved with a post-commit hook or via a GitHub or Bitbucket
repository hook.
We’ve achieved a lot so ar: we’ve installed Jenkins, run it, and created our rst
job. This Jenkins job uses Docker to create an image that we can manage and
keep updated using the Dockerfile contained in our repository. In this scenario,
not only does our inrastructure conguration live with our code, but managing
that conguration becomes a simple process. Containers are then created (rom
that image) in which we then run our tests. When we’re done with the tests, we
can dispose o the containers, which makes our testing ast and lightweight. It is
also easy to adapt this example to test on diferent platorms or using diferent
test rameworks or numerous languages.
TIP You could also use parameterized builds to make this job and the shell
script step more generic to suit multiple rameworks and languages.
Multi-conguration Jenkins
We’ve now seen a simple, single container build using Jenkins. What i we wanted
to test our application on multiple platorms? Let’s say we’d like to test it on
Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS. To do that, we can take advantage o a Jenkins job
type called a ”multi-conguration job” that allows a matrix o test jobs to be run.
When the Jenkins multi-conguration job is run, it will spawn multiple sub-jobs
that will test varying congurations.
Let’s look at creating our new multi-conguration job. Click on the New Item link
rom the Jenkins console. We’re going to name our new job Docker_matrix_job,
select Multi-configuration project, and click OK.
We’ll see a screen that is similar to the job creation screen we saw earlier. Let’s
add a description or our job, select Git as our repository type, and speciy our
sample application repository: https://github.com/turnbullpress/docker-
jenkins-sample.git.
Next, let’s scroll down and congure our multi-conguration axis. The axis is
the list o matrix elements that we’re going to execute as part o the job. We’ll
click the Add Axis button and select User-defined Axis. We’re going to speciy
an axis named OS (which will be short or operating system) and speciy three
values: centos, debian, and ubuntu. When we execute our multi-conguration
job, Jenkins will look at this axis and spawn three jobs: one or each point on the
axis.
Then, in the Build Environment section, we tick Delete workspace before
build starts. This option cleans up our build environment by deleting the
checked-out repository prior to initiating a new set o jobs.
Lastly, we’ve specied another shell build step with a simple shell script. It’s a
modication o the shell script we used earlier.
# Exit with the same value as that with which the process exited.
exit $RC
We see that this script has a modication: we’re changing into directories named
or each operating system or which we’re executing a job. Inside our test repos-
itory that we have three directories: centos, debian, and ubuntu. Inside each
directory is a diferent Dockerfile containing the build instructions or a CentOS,
Debian, or Ubuntu image, respectively. This means that each job that is started
will change into the appropriate directory or the required operating system, build
an image based on that operating system, install any required prerequisites, and
FROM centos:latest
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
RUN yum -y install ruby rubygems rubygem-rake
RUN gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri rspec ci_reporter_rspec
NOTE Like our previous job, it may take a little time to run the rst time,
as it builds the required images in which we’ll test. Once they are built, though,
the next runs should be much aster. Docker will only change the image i you
update the Dockerfile.
We see that the master job executes rst, and then each sub-job executes. Let’s
look at the output o one o these sub-jobs, our new centos job.
We see that it has executed: the green ball tells us it executed successully. We
can drill down into its execution to see more. To do so, click on the #1 entry in
the Build History.
Here we see some more details o the executed centos job. We see that the job has
been Started by upstream project Docker_matrix_job and is build number 1.
To see the exact details o what happened during the run, we can check the console
output by clicking the Console Output link.
We see that the job cloned the repository, built the required Docker image,
spawned a container rom that image, and then ran the required tests. All o
the tests passed successully (we can also check the Test Result link or the
uploaded JUnit test results i required).
We’ve now successully completed a simple, but powerul example o a multi-
platorm testing job or an application.
Other alternatives
One o the more interesting parts o the Docker ecosystem is continuous integra-
tion and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Beyond integration with existing tools
like Jenkins, we’re also seeing people build their own tools and integrations on
top o Docker.
Drone
One o the more promising CI/CD tools being developed on top o Docker is Drone.
Drone is a SAAS continuous integration platorm that connects to GitHub, Bit-
bucket, and Google Code repositories written in a wide variety o languages, in-
cluding Python, Node.js, Ruby, Go, and numerous others. It runs the test suites
o repositories added to it inside a Docker container.
Shippable
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve seen how to use Docker as a core part o our development
and testing workow. We’ve looked at developer-centric testing with Docker on a
local workstation or virtual machine. We’ve also explored scaling that testing up
to a continuous integration model using Jenkins CI as our tool. We’ve seen how
to use Docker or both point testing and how to build distributed matrix jobs.
In the next chapter, we’ll start to see how we can use Docker in production to
provide containerized, stackable, scalable, and resilient services.
In Chapter 5, we saw how to use Docker to acilitate better testing by using con-
tainers in our local development workow and in a continuous integration envi-
ronment. In this chapter, we’re going to explore using Docker to run production
services.
We’re going to build a simple application rst and then build some more complex
multi-container applications. We’ll explore how to make use o Docker eatures
like networking and volumes to combine and manage applications running in
Docker.
The rst application we’re going to build is an on-demand website using the Jekyll
ramework. We’re going to build two images:
• An image that both installs Jekyll and the prerequisites we’ll need and builds
our Jekyll site.
• An image that serves our Jekyll site via Apache.
We’re going to make it on demand by creating a new Jekyll site when a new
container is launched. Our workow is going to be:
207
Chapter 6: Building services with Docker
• Create the Jekyll base image and the Apache image (once-of).
• Create a container rom our Jekyll image that holds our website source
mounted via a volume.
• Create a Docker container rom our Apache image that uses the volume con-
taining the compiled site and serve that out.
• Rinse and repeat as the site needs to be updated.
You could consider this a simple way to create multiple hosted website instances.
Our implementation is simple, but you will see how we extend it beyond this
simple premise later in the chapter.
Let’s start creating a new Dockerfile or our rst image: the Jekyll base image.
Let’s create a new directory rst and an empty Dockerfile.
$ mkdir jekyll
$ cd jekyll
$ vi Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
VOLUME /data
VOLUME /var/www/html
WORKDIR /data
Our Dockerfile uses the template we saw in Chapter 3 as its basis. Our image
is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and installs Ruby and the prerequisites necessary to
support Jekyll. It creates two volumes using the VOLUME instruction:
We also need to set the working directory to /data/ and speciy an ENTRYPOINT
instruction that will automatically build any Jekyll site it nds in the /data/
working directory into the /var/www/html/ directory.
With this Dockerfile, we will now build an image rom which we will launch
containers. We’ll do this using the docker build command.
We see that we’ve built a new image with an ID o 79009691f408 named jamtur01
/jekyll that is our new Jekyll image. We view our new image using the docker
images command.
Finally, let’s build our second image, an Apache server to serve out our new site.
Let’s create a new directory rst and an empty Dockerfile.
$ mkdir apache
$ cd apache
$ vi Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
VOLUME [ "/var/www/html" ]
WORKDIR /var/www/html
EXPOSE 80
ENTRYPOINT [ "/usr/sbin/apache2" ]
CMD ["-D", "FOREGROUND"]
This nal image is again based on Ubuntu 16.04 and installs Apache. It creates a
volume using the VOLUME instruction, /var/www/html/, which is going to hold our
compiled Jekyll website. We also set /var/www/html to be our working directory.
We’ll then use some ENV instructions to set some required environment variables,
create some required directories, and EXPOSE port 80. We’ve also specied an
ENTRYPOINT and CMD combination to run Apache by deault when the container
starts.
With this Dockerfile, we will now build an image rom which we will launch
containers. We do this using the docker build command.
We see that we’ve built a new image with an ID o fc8e9135212d named jamtur01
/apache that is our new Apache image. We view our new image using the docker
images command.
• Jekyll - Our Jekyll image with Ruby and the prerequisites installed.
• Apache - The image that will serve our compiled website via the Apache web
server.
Let’s get started on our new site by creating a new Jekyll container using the
docker run command. We’re going to launch a container and build our site.
We’re going to need some source code or our blog. Let’s clone a sample Jekyll
blog into our $HOME directory (in my case /home/james).
$ cd $HOME
$ git clone https://github.com/turnbullpress/james_blog.git
You can see a basic Twitter Bootstrap-enabled Jekyll blog inside this directory. I
you want to use it, you can easily update the _config.yml le and the theme to
suit your purposes.
Now let’s use this sample data inside our Jekyll container.
We’ve started a new container called james_blog and mounted our james_blog
directory inside the container as the /data/ volume. The container has taken
this source code and built it into a compiled site stored in the /var/www/html/
directory.
So we’ve got a completed site, now how do we use it? This is where volumes
become a lot more interesting. When we briey introduced volumes in Chapter
4, we discovered a bit about them. Let’s revisit that.
A volume is a specially designated directory within one or more containers that
bypasses the Union File System to provide several useul eatures or persistent or
shared data:
This allows you to add data (e.g., source code, a database, or other content) into
an image without committing it to the image and allows you to share that data
between containers.
TIP In Docker 1.9 volumes have been expanded to also support third-party
storage systems like Ceph, Flocker and EMC via plugins. You can read about them
in the volume plugins documentation and the docker volume create command
documentation.
So i we want to use our compiled site in the /var/www/html/ volume rom another
container, we can do so. To do this, we’ll create a new container that links to this
volume.
This looks like a typical docker run, except that we’ve used a new ag: --volumes
-from. The --volumes-from ag adds any volumes in the named container to the
newly created container. This means our Apache container has access to the com-
piled Jekyll site in the /var/www/html volume within the james_blog container
we created earlier. It has that access even though the james_blog container is not
running. As you’ll recall, that is one o the special properties o volumes. The
container does have to exist, though.
NOTE Even i you delete the last container that uses a volume, the volume
will still persist.
What is the end result o building our Jekyll website? Let’s see onto what port our
container has mapped our exposed port 80:
Things get even more interesting when we want to update our site. Let’s say we’d
like to make some changes to our Jekyll website. We’re going to rename our blog
by editing the james_blog/_config.yml le.
$ vi james_blog/_config.yml
We see that the Jekyll build process has been run a second time and our site has
been updated. The update has been written to our volume. Now i we browse to
the Jekyll website, we should see our update.
This all happened without having to update or restart our Apache container, be-
cause the volume it was sharing was updated automatically. You can see how easy
this workow is and how you could expand it or more complicated deployments.
You’re probably a little worried about accidentally deleting your volume (although
we can prettily easily rebuild our site using the existing process). One o the
advantages o volumes is that because they can be mounted into any container,
we can easily create backups o them. Let’s create a new container now that backs
up the /var/www/html volume.
Here we’ve run a stock Ubuntu container and mounted the volume rom
james_blog into that container. That will create the directory /var/www/html
inside the container. We’ve then used the -v ag to mount our current directory,
using the $(pwd) command, inside the container at /backup. Our container then
runs the command.
TIP We’ve also specied the --rm ag, which is useul or single-use or throw-
away containers. It automatically deletes the container ater the process running
in it is ended. This is a neat way o tidying up ater ourselves or containers we
only need once.
the /var/www/html directory and then exit. This process creates a backup o our
volume.
This is a simple example o a backup process. You could easily extend this to back
up to storage locally or in the cloud (e.g., to Amazon S3 or to more traditional
backup sotware like Amanda).
TIP This example could also work or a database stored in a volume or similar
data. Simply mount the volume in a resh container, perorm your backup, and
discard the container you created or the backup.
Here are some ways we could expand on our simple Jekyll website service:
• Run multiple Apache containers, all which use the same volume rom the
james_blog container. Put a load balancer in ront o it, and we have a web
cluster.
• Build a urther image that cloned or copied a user-provided source (e.g., a
git clone) into a volume. Mount this volume into a container created rom
our jamtur01/jeykll image. This would make the solution portable and
generic and would not require any local source on a host.
• With the previous expansion, you could easily build a web ront end or our
service that built and deployed sites automatically rom a specied source.
Then you would have your own variant o GitHub Pages.
Now let’s take a slightly diferent tack and think about Docker as an application
server and build pipeline. This time we’re serving a more ”enterprisey” and tra-
ditional workload: etching and running a Java application rom a WAR le in a
Tomcat server. To do this, we’re going to build a two-stage Docker pipeline:
• An image that pulls down specied WAR les rom a URL and stores them
in a volume.
• An image with a Tomcat server installed that runs those downloaded WAR
les.
Let’s start by building an image to download a WAR le or us and mount it in a
volume.
$ mkdir fetcher
$ cd fetcher
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
VOLUME [ "/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/" ]
WORKDIR /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/
ENTRYPOINT [ "wget" ]
CMD [ "-?" ]
This incredibly simple image does one thing: it wgets whatever le rom a URL
that is specied when a container is run rom it and stores the le in the /var/lib
/tomcat7/webapps/ directory. This directory is also a volume and the working
directory or any containers. We’re going to share this volume with our Tomcat
server and run its contents.
Finally, the ENTRYPOINT and CMD instructions allow our container to run when no
URL is specied; they do so by returning the wget help output when the container
is run without a URL.
Let’s build this image now.
Let’s etch an example le as a way to get started with our new image. We’re
going to download the sample Apache Tomcat application rom https://tomcat.
apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/appdev/sample/.
We see that our container has taken the provided URL and downloaded the sample
.war le. We can’t see it here, but because we set the working directory in the con-
tainer, that sample.war le will have ended up in our /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps
/ directory.
Our WAR le is in the /var/lib/docker directory. Let’s rst establish where the
volume is located using the docker inspect command.
$ ls -l /var/lib/docker/volumes/
c20a0567145677ed46938825f285402566e821462632e1842e82bc51b47fe4dc
/_data
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4606 Mar 31 2012 sample.war
We have an image that will get us WAR les, and we have a sample WAR le down-
loaded into a container. Let’s build an image that will be the Tomcat application
server that will run our WAR le.
$ mkdir tomcat7
$ cd tomcat7
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
VOLUME [ "/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/" ]
EXPOSE 8080
Our image is pretty simple. We need to install a Java JDK and the Tomcat server.
We’ll speciy some environment variables Tomcat needs in order to get started,
then create a temporary directory. We’ll also create a volume called /var/lib
/tomcat7/webapps/, expose port 8080 (the Tomcat deault), and nally use an
ENTRYPOINT instruction to launch Tomcat.
Now let’s see our Tomcat server in action by creating a new Tomcat instance
running our sample application.
This will create a new container named sample_app that reuses the volumes rom
the sample container. This means our WAR le, stored in the /var/lib/tomcat7/
webapps/ volume, will be mounted rom the sample container into the sample_app
container and then loaded by Tomcat and executed.
Let’s look at our sample application in the web browser. First, we must identiy
the port being exposed using the docker port command.
Now let’s browse to our application (using the URL and port and adding the /
sample sux) and see what’s there.
Now we have the building blocks o a simple on-demand web service. Let’s look
at how we might expand on this. To do so, we’ve built a simple Sinatra-based web
application to automatically provision Tomcat applications via a web page. We’ve
called this application TProv. You can see its source code here or on GitHub.
Let’s install it as a demo o how you might extend this or similar examples. First,
we’ll need to ensure Ruby is installed. We’re going to install our TProv application
on our Docker host because our application is going to be directly interacting with
our Docker daemon, so that’s where we need to install Ruby.
NOTE We could also install the TProv application inside a Docker container.
This will install the TProv application and some supporting gems.
We then launch the application using the tprov binary.
$ sudo tprov
[2014-06-21 16:17:24] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
[2014-06-21 16:17:24] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2011-06-30) [x86_64-linux
]
== Sinatra/1.4.5 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with
backup from WEBrick
[2014-06-21 16:17:24] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=14209
port=4567
This command has launched our application; now we can browse to the TProv
website on port 4567 o the Docker host.
We speciy a Tomcat application name and the URL to a Tomcat WAR le. Let’s
download a sample calendar application rom here and call it Calendar.
We click Submit to download the WAR le, place it into a volume, run a Tomcat
server, and serve the WAR le in that volume. We see our instance by clicking on
the List instances link.
This shows us:
Using this inormation, we check the status o our application by browsing to the
mapped port. We can also use the Delete? checkbox to remove an instance.
You can see how we achieved this by looking at the TProv application code. It’s a
pretty simple application that shells out to the docker binary and captures output
to run and remove containers.
You’re welcome to use the TProv code or adapt or write your own 1 , but its primary
purpose is to show you how easy it is to extend a simple application deployment
pipeline built with Docker.
WARNING The TProv application is pretty simple and lacks some error
handling and tests. It’s simple code, built in an hour to demonstrate how powerul
Docker can be as a tool or building applications and services. I you nd a bug
with the application (or want to make it better), please let me know with an issue
or PR here.
In our last service example, we’re going ull hipster by Dockerizing a Node.js
application that makes use o the Express ramework with a Redis back end. We’re
going to demonstrate a combination o all the Docker eatures we’ve learned over
the last two chapters, including networking and volumes.
In our sample application, we’re going to build a series o images that will allow
us to deploy a multi-container application:
We’re then going to run our Node application in a container with Redis in primary-
replica conguration in multiple containers behind it.
Let’s start with an image that installs Node.js, our Express application, and the
associated prerequisites.
$ mkdir -p nodejs/nodeapp
$ cd nodejs/nodeapp
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamtur01/dockerbook-code
/master/code/6/node/nodejs/nodeapp/package.json
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamtur01/dockerbook-code
/master/code/6/node/nodejs/nodeapp/server.js
$ cd ..
$ vi Dockerfile
We’ve created a new directory called nodejs and a sub-directory, nodeapp, to hold
our application code. We’ve then changed into this directory and downloaded the
source code or our Node.JS application.
NOTE You can get our Node application’s source code here or on GitHub
here.
Finally, we’ve changed back to the nodejs directory and now we populate our
Dockerfile.
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
WORKDIR /opt/nodeapp
RUN npm install
VOLUME [ "/var/log/nodeapp" ]
EXPOSE 3000
Our Node.js image installs Node and makes a simple workaround o linking the
binary nodejs to node to address some backwards compatibility issues on Ubuntu.
We then add our nodeapp code into the /opt/nodeapp directory using an ADD in-
struction. Our Node.js application is a simple Express server and contains both
a package.json le holding the application’s dependency inormation and the
server.js le that contains our actual application. Let’s look at a subset o that
application.
. . .
app.configure(function() {
. . .
app.use(express.session({
store: new RedisStore({
host: process.env.REDIS_HOST || 'redis_primary',
port: process.env.REDIS_PORT || 6379,
db: process.env.REDIS_DB || 0
}),
cookie: {
. . .
. . .
The server.js le pulls in all the dependencies and starts an Express application.
The Express app is congured to store its session inormation in Redis and exposes
a single endpoint that returns a status message as JSON. We’ve congured its
connection to Redis to use a host called redis_primary with an option to override
this with an environment variable i needed.
The application will also log to the /var/log/nodeapp/nodeapp.log le and will
listen on port 3000.
NOTE You can get our Node application’s source code here or on GitHub
here.
We’ve then set the working directory to /opt/nodeapp and installed the prereq-
uisites or our Node application. We’ve also created a volume that will hold our
Node application’s logs, /var/log/nodeapp.
We expose port 3000 and nally speciy an ENTRYPOINT o nodejs server.js that
will run our Node application.
Let’s build our image now.
Let’s continue with our rst Redis image: a base image that will install Redis. It
is on top o this base image that we’ll build our Redis primary and replica images.
$ mkdir redis_base
$ cd redis_base
$ vi Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
EXPOSE 6379
CMD []
Our Redis base image installs the latest version o Redis (rom a PPA rather than
using the older packages shipped with Ubuntu), species two VOLUMEs (/var/lib
/redis and /var/log/redis), and exposes the Redis deault port 6379. It doesn’t
have an ENTRYPOINT or CMD because we’re not actually going to run this image.
We’re just going to build on top o it.
Let’s continue with our rst Redis image: a Redis primary server.
$ mkdir redis_primary
$ cd redis_primary
$ vi Dockerfile
FROM jamtur01/redis
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
Our Redis primary image is based on our jamtur01/redis image and has an
ENTRYPOINT that runs the deault Redis server with logging directed to /var/log/
redis/redis-server.log.
$ mkdir redis_replica
$ cd redis_replica
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM jamtur01/redis
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
Again, we base our image on jamtur01/redis and speciy an ENTRYPOINT that runs
the deault Redis server with our logle and the slaveof option. This congures
our primary-replica relationship and tells any containers built rom this image
that they are a replica o the redis_primary host and should attempt replication
on port 6379.
Let’s build our Redis replica image now.
Now that we have both a Redis primary and replica image, we build our own Redis
replication environment. Let’s start by creating a network to hold our Express
application. We’ll call it express.
Now let’s run the Redis primary container inside this network.
Here we’ve created a container with the docker run command rom the jamtur01
/redis_primary image. We’ve used a new ag that we’ve not seen beore, -h,
which sets the hostname o the container. This overrides the deault behavior
(setting the hostname o the container to the short container ID) and allows us to
speciy our own hostname. We’ll use this to ensure that our container is given a
hostname o redis_primary and will thus be resolved that way with local DNS.
We’ve specied the --name ag to ensure that our container’s name is
redis_primary and we’ve specied the --net ag to run the container in
the express network. We’re going to use this network or our container
connectivity, as we’ll see shortly.
Let’s see what the docker logs command can tell us about our Redis primary
container.
Nothing? Why is that? Our Redis server is logging to a le rather than to standard
out, so we see nothing in the Docker logs. So how can we tell what’s happening
to our Redis server? To do that, we use the /var/log/redis volume we created
earlier. Let’s use this volume and read some log les now.
Here we’ve run another container interactively. We’ve specied the --rm ag,
which automatically deletes a container ater the process it runs stops. We’ve
also specied the --volumes-from ag and told it to mount the volumes rom our
redis_primary container. Then we’ve specied a base ubuntu image and told it to
cat the /var/log/redis/redis-server.log log le. This takes advantage o vol-
umes to allow us to mount the /var/log/redis directory rom the redis_primary
container and read the log le inside it. We’re going to see more about how we
use this shortly.
Looking at our Redis logs, we see some general warnings, but everything is looking
pretty good. Our Redis server is ready to receive data on port 6379.
So next, let’s create our rst Redis replica.
We’ve run another container: this one rom the jamtur01/redis_replica image.
We’ve again specied a hostname (with the -h ag) o redis_replica1 and a
name (with --name) o redis_replica1. We’ve also used the --net ag to run our
Redis replica container inside the express network.
Let’s check this new container’s logs.
We’ve run another container to query our logs interactively. We’ve again specied
the --rm ag, which automatically deletes a container ater the process it runs
stops. We’ve specied the --volumes-from ag and told it to mount the volumes
rom our redis_replica1 container this time. Then we’ve specied a base ubuntu
image and told it to cat the /var/log/redis/redis-replica.log log le.
Woot! We’re of and replicating between our redis_primary container and our
redis_replica1 container.
Now that we’ve got our Redis cluster running, we launch a container or our
Node.js application.
We’ve created a new container rom our jamtur01/nodejs image, specied a name
o nodeapp, and mapped port 3000 inside the container to port 3000 outside. We’ve
also run our new nodeapp container in the express network.
We use the docker logs command to see what’s going on in our nodeapp con-
tainer.
Here we see that our Node application is bound and listening at port 3000.
Let’s browse to our Docker host and see the application at work.
{
"status": "ok"
}
That tells us it’s working. Our session state will also be recorded and stored in
our primary Redis container, redis_primary, then replicated to our Redis replicas:
redis_replica1 and redis_replica2.
Now that our application is up and running, we’ll want to put it into production,
which involves ensuring that we capture its log output and put it into our logging
servers. We are going to use Logstash to do so. We’re going to start by creating
an image that installs Logstash.
$ mkdir logstash
$ cd logstash
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
WORKDIR /opt/logstash
ENTRYPOINT [ "bin/logstash" ]
CMD [ "--config=/etc/logstash.conf" ]
We’ve created an image that installs Logstash and adds a logstash.conf le to
the /etc/ directory using the ADD instruction. Let’s quickly create this le in the
logstash directory. Add a le called logstash.conf and populate it like so:
input {
file {
type => "syslog"
path => ["/var/log/nodeapp/nodeapp.log", "/var/log/redis/
redis-server.log"]
}
}
output {
stdout {
codec => rubydebug
}
}
NOTE I you don’t know much about Logstash, you can learn more rom
my book or the Logstash documentation.
pass in our command ags. This will launch Logstash and load our /etc/logstash
.conf conguration le.
Now that we’ve built our Logstash image, we launch a container rom it.
We’ve launched a new container called logstash and specied the --volumes-
from ag twice to get the volumes rom the redis_primary and nodeapp. This
gives us access to the Node and Redis log les. Any events added to those les
will be reected in the volumes in the logstash container and passed to Logstash
or processing.
Let’s browse to our web application again and reresh it to generate an event. We
should see that event reected in our logstash container output.
{
"message" => "::ffff:198.179.69.250 - - [Fri, 05 Aug 2016
16:39:25 GMT] \"GET / HTTP/1.1\" 200 20 \"-\" \"Mozilla
/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit
/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari
/537.36\"",
"@version" => "1",
"@timestamp" => "2016-08-05T16:39:25.945Z",
"host" => "1bbc26b1ed7d",
"path" => "/var/log/nodeapp/nodeapp.log",
"type" => "syslog"
}
And now we have our Node and Redis containers logging to Logstash. In a produc-
tion environment, we’d be sending these events to a Logstash server and storing
them in Elasticsearch. We could also easily add our Redis replica containers or
other components o the solution to our logging environment.
We’ve now seen a multi-container application stack. We’ve used Docker network-
ing to connect our application together and Docker volumes to help manage a
variety o aspects o our application. We can build on this oundation to produce
more complex applications and architectures.
Lastly, beore we wrap up our chapter on running services with Docker, it’s im-
portant to understand some o the ways we can manage Docker containers and
how those difer rom some more traditional management techniques.
Traditionally, when managing services, we’re used to SSHing into our environ-
ment or virtual machines to manage them. In the Docker world, where most
containers run a single process, this access isn’t available. As we’ve seen much o
the time, this access isn’t needed: we will use volumes or networking to perorm
a lot o the same actions. For example, i our service is managed via a network
interace, we expose that on a container; i our service is managed through a Unix
socket, we expose that with a volume. I we need to send a signal to a Docker
container, we use the docker kill command, like so:
This will send the specic signal you want (e.g., a HUP) to the container in question
rather than killing the container.
Sometimes, however, we do need to sign into a container. To do that, though, we
don’t need to run an SSH service or open up any access. We can use the docker
exec command
NOTE The docker exec command introduced in Docker 1.3 replaces the
previous tool, nsenter.
This will launch an interactive Bash shell inside our nodeapp container.
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve seen how to build some example production services using
Docker containers. We’ve seen a bit more about how we build multi-container
services and manage those stacks. We’ve combined eatures like Docker network-
ing and volumes and learned how to potentially extend those eatures to provide
us with capabilities like logging and backups.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at orchestration with Docker using the Docker
Compose, Docker Swarm and Consul tools.
Orchestration is a pretty loosely dened term. It’s broadly the process o auto-
mated conguration, coordination, and management o services. In the Docker
world we use it to describe the set o practices around managing applications run-
ning in multiple Docker containers and potentially across multiple Docker hosts.
Native orchestration is in its inancy in the Docker community but an exciting
ecosystem o tools is being integrated and developed.
In the current ecosystem there are a variety o tools being built and integrated
with Docker. Some o these tools are simply designed to elegantly ”wire” together
multiple containers and build application stacks using simple composition. Other
tools provide larger scale coordination between multiple Docker hosts as well as
complex service discovery, scheduling and execution capabilities.
Each o these areas really deserves its own book but we’ve ocused on a ew useul
tools that give you some insight into what you can achieve when orchestrating
containers. They provide some useul building blocks upon which you can grow
your Docker-enabled environment.
In this chapter we will ocus on three areas:
254
Chapter 7: Docker Orchestration and Service Discovery
oped by the Orchard team and then acquired by Docker Inc in 2014. It’s
written in Python and licensed with the Apache 2.0 license.
TIP We’ll also talk about many o the other orchestration tools available to
you later in this chapter.
Docker Compose
Now let’s get amiliar with Docker Compose. With Docker Compose, we dene a
set o containers to boot up, and their runtime properties, all dened in a YAML
le. Docker Compose calls each o these containers ”services” which it denes as:
A container that interacts with other containers in some way and that
has specic runtime properties.
We’re going to take you through installing Docker Compose and then using it to
build a simple, multi-container application stack.
This will download the docker-compose binary rom GitHub and install it into
the /usr/local/bin directory. We’ve also used the chmod command to make the
docker-compose binary executable so we can run it.
I we’re on OS X Docker Compose comes bundled with Docker or Mac or we can
install it like so:
TIP Replace the 1.8.0 with the release number o the current Docker Compose
release.
I we’re on Windows Docker Compose comes bundled inside Docker or Windows.
Compose is also available as a Python package i you’re on another platorm or
i you preer installing via package. You will need to have the Python-Pip tool
installed to use the pip command. This is available via the python-pip package
on most Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu releases.
Once you have installed the docker-compose binary you can test it’s working using
the docker-compose command with the --version ag:
$ docker-compose --version
docker-compose version 1.8.0, build f3628c7
To demonstrate how Compose works we’re going to use a sample Python Flask
application that combines two containers:
Let’s start with building our sample application. Firstly, we create a directory and
a Dockerfile.
$ mkdir composeapp
$ cd composeapp
Here we’ve created a directory to hold our sample application, which we’re calling
composeapp.
Next, we need to add our application code. Let’s create a le called app.py in the
composeapp directory and add the ollowing Python code to it.
app = Flask(__name__)
redis = Redis(host="redis", port=6379)
@app.route('/')
def hello():
redis.incr('hits')
return 'Hello Docker Book reader! I have been seen {0} times'
.format(redis.get('hits'))
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run(host="0.0.0.0", debug=True)
TIP You can nd this source code on GitHub here or on the Docker Book site
here.
This simple Flask application tracks a counter stored in Redis. The counter is
incremented each time the root URL, /, is hit.
We also need to create a requirements.txt le to store our application’s depen-
dencies. Let’s create that le now and add the ollowing dependencies.
flask
redis
ADD . /composeapp
WORKDIR /composeapp
Our Dockerfile is simple. It is based on the python:2.7 image. We add our app
.py and requirements.txt les into a directory in the image called /composeapp.
The Dockerfile then sets the working directory to /composeapp and runs the pip
installation process to install our application’s dependencies: flask and redis.
Let’s build that image now using the docker build command.
This will build a new image called jamtur01/composeapp containing our sample
application and its required dependencies. We can now use Compose to deploy
our application.
NOTE We’ll be using a Redis container created rom the deault Redis
image on the Docker Hub so we don’t need to build or customize that.
Now we’ve got our application image built we can congure Compose to create
both the services we require. With Compose, we dene a set o services (in the
orm o Docker containers) to launch. We also dene the runtime properties we
want these services to start with, much as you would do with the docker run
command. We dene all o this in a YAML le. We then run the docker-compose
up command. Compose launches the containers, executes the appropriate runtime
conguration, and multiplexes the log output together or us.
Let’s create a docker-compose.yml le or our application inside our composeapp
directory.
$ touch docker-compose.yml
web:
image: jamtur01/composeapp
command: python app.py
ports:
- "5000:5000"
volumes:
- .:/composeapp
links:
- redis
redis:
image: redis
Each service we wish to launch is specied as a YAML hash here: web and redis.
For our web service we’ve specied some runtime options. Firstly, we’ve specied
the image we’re using: the jamtur01/composeapp image. Compose can also build
Docker images. You can use the build instruction and provide the path to a
Dockerfile to have Compose build an image and then create services rom it.
web:
build: /home/james/composeapp
. . .
This build instruction would build a Docker image rom a Dockerfile ound in
the /home/james/composeapp directory.
We’ve also specied the command to run when launching the service. Next we
speciy the ports and volumes as a list o the port mappings and volumes we want
or our service. We’ve specied that we’re mapping port 5000 inside our service
to port 5000 on the host. We’re also creating /composeapp as a volume. Finally,
we speciy any links or this service. Here we link our web service to the redis
service.
I we were executing the same conguration on the command line using docker
run we’d do it like so:
Next we’ve specied another service called redis. For this service we’re not set-
ting any runtime deaults at all. We’re just going to use the base redis image. By
deault, containers run rom this image launches a Redis database on the standard
port. So we don’t need to congure or customize it.
TIP You can see a ull list o the available instructions you can use in the
docker-compose.yml le here.
Running Compose
$ cd composeapp
$ sudo docker-compose up
Creating composeapp_redis_1
Creating composeapp_web_1
Attaching to composeapp_redis_1, composeapp_web_1
redis_1 | _._
redis_1 | _.-``__ ''-._
redis_1 | _.-`` `. `_. ''-._ Redis 3.2.3
(00000000/0)
redis_1 | .-`` .-```. ```\/ _.,_ ''-._
redis_1 | ( ' , .-` | `, ) Running in
standalone mode
redis_1 | |`-._`-...-` __...-.``-._|'` _.-'| Port: 6379
redis_1 | | `-._ `._ / _.-' | PID: 1
redis_1 | `-._ `-._ `-./ _.-' _.-'
redis_1 | |`-._`-._ `-.__.-' _.-'_.-'|
redis_1 | | `-._`-._ _.-'_.-' | http://
redis.io
redis_1 | `-._ `-._`-.__.-'_.-' _.-'
redis_1 | |`-._`-._ `-.__.-' _.-'_.-'|
redis_1 | | `-._`-._ _.-'_.-' |
redis_1 | `-._ `-._`-.__.-'_.-' _.-'
redis_1 | `-._ `-.__.-' _.-'
redis_1 | `-._ _.-'
redis_1 | `-.__.-'
redis_1 |
redis_1 | 1:M 05 Aug 17:49:17.839 * The server is now ready to
accept connections on port 6379
web_1 | * Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to
quit)
TIP You must be inside the directory with the docker-compose.yml le in
order to execute most Compose commands.
Compose then attaches to the logs o each service, each line o log output is pre-
xed with the abbreviated name o the service it comes rom, and outputs them
multiplexed:
The services (and Compose) are being run interactively. That means i you use
Ctrl-C or the like to cancel Compose then it’ll stop the running services. We
could also run Compose with -d ag to run our services daemonized (similar to
the docker run -d ag).
$ sudo docker-compose up -d
Let’s look at the sample application that’s now running on the host. The applica-
tion is bound to all interaces on the Docker host on port 5000. So we can browse
to that site on the host’s IP address or via localhost.
We see a message displaying the current counter value. We can increment the
counter by rereshing the site. Each reresh stores the increment in Redis. The
Redis update is done via the link between the Docker containers controlled by
Compose.
TIP By deault, Compose tries to connect to a local Docker daemon but it’ll
also honor the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to connect to a remote Docker
host.
Using Compose
Now let’s explore some o Compose’s other options. Firstly, let’s use Ctrl-C to
cancel our running services and then restart them as daemonized services.
Press Ctrl-C inside the composeapp directory and then re-run the docker-compose
up command, this time with the -d ag.
$ sudo docker-compose up -d
Recreating composeapp_redis_1...
Recreating composeapp_web_1...
$ . . .
We see that Compose has recreated our services, launched them and returned to
the command line.
Our Compose-managed services are now running daemonized on the host. Let’s
look at them now using the docker-compose ps command; a close cousin o the
docker ps command.
The docker-compose ps command lists all o the currently running services rom
our local docker-compose.yml le.
$ cd composeapp
$ sudo docker-compose ps
Name Command State Ports
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-
composeapp_redis_1 docker-entrypoint.sh redis Up 6379/tcp
composeapp_web_1 python app.py Up 0.0.0.0:5000
->5000/tcp
This shows some basic inormation about our running Compose services. The
name o each service, what command we used to start the service, and the ports
that are mapped on each service.
We can also drill down urther using the docker-compose logs command to show
us the log events rom our services.
This will tail the log les o your services, much as the tail -f command. Like
the tail -f command you’ll need to use Ctrl-C or the like to exit rom it.
We can also stop our running services with the docker-compose stop command.
This will stop both services. I the services don’t stop you can use the docker-
compose kill command to orce kill the services.
$ sudo docker-compose ps
Name Command State Ports
-------------------------------------------------
composeapp_redis_1 redis-server Exit 0
composeapp_web_1 python app.py Exit 0
$ sudo docker-compose rm
Going to remove composeapp_redis_1, composeapp_web_1
Are you sure? [yN] y
Removing composeapp_redis_1...
Removing composeapp_web_1...
You’ll be prompted to conrm you wish to remove the services and then both
services will be deleted. The docker-compose ps command will now show no
running or stopped services.
$ sudo docker-compose ps
Name Command State Ports
------------------------------
Compose in summary
Now in one le we have a simple Python-Redis stack built! You can see how much
easier this can make constructing applications rom multiple Docker containers.
This, however, just scratches the surace o what you can do with Compose. There
are some more examples using Rails, Django and Wordpress on the Compose web-
site that introduce some more advanced concepts.
To get a better understanding o how Consul works, we’re going to see how to
run distributed Consul inside Docker containers. We’re then going to register
services rom Docker containers to Consul and query that data rom other Docker
containers. To make it more interesting we’re going to do this across multiple
Docker hosts.
To do this we’re going to:
We’re going to start with creating a Dockerfile to build our Consul image. Let’s
create a directory to hold our Consul image rst.
$ mkdir consul
$ cd consul
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull <[email protected]>
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2014-08-01
ADD https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/0.6.4/consul_0.6.4
_linux_amd64.zip /tmp/consul.zip
RUN cd /usr/sbin; unzip /tmp/consul.zip; chmod +x /usr/sbin/
consul; rm /tmp/consul.zip
VOLUME ["/data"]
Our Dockerfile is pretty simple. It’s based on an Ubuntu 16.04 image. It installs
curl and unzip. We then download the Consul zip le containing the consul
binary. We move that binary to /usr/sbin/ and make it executable. We also
download Consul’s web interace and place it into a directory called /webui. We’re
going to see this web interace in action a little later.
We then add a conguration le or Consul, consul.json, to the /config directory.
Let’s create and look at that le now.
{
"data_dir": "/data",
"ui_dir": "/webui",
"client_addr": "0.0.0.0",
"ports": {
"dns": 53
},
"recursor": "8.8.8.8"
}
The consul.json conguration le is JSON ormatted and provides Consul with
the inormation needed to get running. We’ve specied a data directory, /data,
to hold Consul’s data. We also speciy the location o the web interace les: /
webui. We use the client_addr variable to bind Consul to all interaces inside our
container.
We also use the ports block to congure on which ports various Consul services
run. In this case we’re speciying that Consul’s DNS service should run on port
53. Lastly, we’ve used the recursor option to speciy a DNS server to use or
resolution i Consul can’t resolve a DNS request. We’ve specied 8.8.8.8 which
is one o the IP addresses o Google’s public DNS service.
TIP You can nd the ull list o available Consul conguration options here.
Back in our Dockerfile we’ve used the EXPOSE instruction to open up a series o
ports that Consul requires to operate. I’ve added a table showing each o these
Port Purpose
53/udp DNS server
8300 Server RPC
8301 + udp Ser LAN port
8302 + udp Ser WAN port
8400 RPC endpoint
8500 HTTP API
You don’t need to worry about most o them or the purposes o this chapter. The
important ones or us are 53/udp which is the port Consul is going to be running
DNS on. We’re going to use DNS to query service inormation. We’re also going to
use Consul’s HTTP API and its web interace, both o which are bound to port 8500.
The rest o the ports handle the backend communication and clustering between
Consul nodes. We’ll congure them in our Docker container but we don’t do
anything specic with them.
NOTE You can nd more details o what each port does here.
Next, we’ve also made our /data directory a volume using the VOLUME instruction.
This is useul i we want to manage or work with this data as we saw in Chapter
6.
Finally, we’ve specied an ENTRYPOINT instruction to launch Consul using the
consul binary when a container is launched rom our image.
Let’s step through the command line options we’ve used. We’ve specied the
consul binary in /usr/sbin/. We’ve passed it the agent command which tells
Consul to run as an agent and the -config-dir ag and specied the location o
our consul.json le in the /config directory.
NOTE You can get our Consul Dockerfile and conguration le here or
on GitHub here. I you don’t want to use a home grown image there is also an
ocially santionced Consul image on the Docker Hub.
Beore we run Consul on multiple hosts, let’s see it working locally on a single
host. To do this we’ll run a container rom our new jamtur01/consul image.
. . .
We’ve used the docker run command to create a new container. We’ve mapped
two ports, port 8500 in the container to 8500 on the host and port 53 in the con-
tainer to 53 on the host. We’ve also used the -h ag to speciy the hostname o
the container, here node1. This is going to be both the hostname o the container
and the name o the Consul node. We’ve then specied the name o our Consul
image, jamtur01/consul.
Lastly, we’ve passed two ags to the consul binary: -server and -bootstrap. The
-server ag tells the Consul agent to operate in server mode. The -bootstrap ag
tells Consul that this node is allowed to sel-elect as a leader. This allows us to
see a Consul agent in server mode doing a Rat leadership election.
We see that Consul has started node1 and done a local leader election. As we’ve
got no other Consul nodes running it is not connected to anything else.
We can also see this via the Consul web interace i we browse to our local host’s
IP address on port 8500.
As Consul is distributed we’d normally create three (or more) hosts to run in sep-
arate data centers, clouds or regions. Or even add an agent to every application
server. This will provide us with sucient distributed resilience. We’re going
to mimic this required distribution by creating three hosts each with a Docker
daemon to run Consul. Instead, we have created three new Ubuntu 16.04 hosts:
larry, curly, and moe. On each host we’ve installed a Docker daemon. We’ve
also pulled down the jamtur01/consul image.
TIP To install Docker you can use the installation instructions in Chapter 2.
On each host we’re going to run a Docker container with the jamtur01/consul
image. To do this we need to choose a network to run Consul over. In most cases
this would be a private network but as we’re just simulating a Consul cluster I
am going to use the public interaces o each host. To start Consul on this public
network I am going to need the public IP address o each host. This is the address
to which we’re going to bind each Consul agent.
Let’s grab that now on larry and assign it to an environment variable, $PUBLIC_IP.
And then create the same $PUBLIC_IP variable on curly and moe too.
We see we’ve got three hosts and three IP addresses, each assigned to the
$PUBLIC_IP environmental variable.
Host IP Address
larry 162.243.167.159
curly 162.243.170.66
moe 159.203.191.16
We’re also going to need to nominate a host to bootstrap to start the cluster. We’re
going to choose larry. This means we’ll need larry’s IP address on curly and moe
to tell them which Consul node’s cluster to join. Let’s set that up now by adding
larry’s IP address o 162.243.167.159 to curly and moe as the environment vari-
able, $JOIN_IP.
curly$ JOIN_IP=162.243.167.159
moe$ JOIN_IP=162.243.167.159
Let’s start our initial bootstrap node on larry. Our docker run command is going
to be a little complex because we’re mapping a lot o ports. Indeed, we need to
map all the ports listed in Table 7.1 above. And, as we’re both running Consul in
a container and connecting to containers on other hosts, we’re going to map each
port to the corresponding port on the local host. This will allow both internal and
external access to Consul.
Let’s see our docker run command now.
We’ve also specied some command line options or the Consul agent.
The -server ag tell the agent to run in server mode. The -advertise ag tells
that server to advertise itsel on the IP address specied in the $PUBLIC_IP environ-
ment variable. Lastly, the -bootstrap-expect ag tells Consul how many agents
to expect in this cluster. In this case, 3 agents. It also bootstraps the cluster.
Let’s look at the logs o our initial Consul container with the docker logs com-
mand.
. . .
We see that the agent on larry is started but because we don’t have any more
nodes yet no election has taken place. We know this rom the only error returned.
Now we’ve bootstrapped our cluster we can start our remaining nodes on curly
and moe. Let’s start with curly. We use the docker run command to launch our
second agent.
We see our command is similar to our bootstrapped node on larry with the ex-
ception o the command we’re passing to the Consul agent.
Again we’ve enabled the Consul agent’s server mode with -server and bound the
agent to the public IP address using the -advertise ag. Finally, we’ve told Con-
sul to join our Consul cluster by speciying larry’s IP address using the $JOIN_IP
environment variable.
Let’s see what happened when we launched our container.
. . .
We see curly has joined larry, indeed on larry we should see something like the
ollowing:
But we’ve still not got a quorum in our cluster, remember we told -bootstrap-
expect to expect 3 nodes. So let’s start our nal agent on moe.
Our docker run command is basically the same as what we ran on curly. But this
time we have three agents in our cluster. Now, i we look at the container’s logs,
we will see a ull cluster.
. . .
We see rom our container’s logs that moe has joined the cluster. This causes Consul
to reach its expected number o cluster members and triggers a leader election. In
this case larry is elected cluster leader.
We see the result o this nal agent joining in the Consul logs on larry too.
We can also browse to the Consul web interace on larry on port 8500 and select
the Consul service to see the current state
Finally, we can test the DNS is working using the dig command. We speciy our
local Docker bridge IP as the DNS server. That’s the IP address o the Docker
interace: docker0.
We see the interace has an IP o 172.17.0.1. We then use this with the dig
command.
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;consul.service.consul. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
consul.service.consul. 0 IN A 162.243.170.66
consul.service.consul. 0 IN A 159.203.191.16
consul.service.consul. 0 IN A 162.243.167.159
Here we’ve queried the IP o the local Docker interace as a DNS server and asked
it to return any inormation on consul.service.consul. This ormat is Consul’s
DNS shorthand or services: consul is the host and service.consul is the domain.
Here consul.service.consul represent the DNS entry or the Consul service itsel.
For example:
Would return all DNS A records or the service webservice. We can also query
individual nodes.
TIP You can see more details on Consul’s DNS interace here.
We now have a running Consul cluster inside Docker containers running on three
separate hosts. That’s pretty cool but it’s not overly useul. Let’s see how we can
register a service in Consul and then retrieve that data.
To register our service we’re going to create a phony distributed application writ-
ten in the uWSGI ramework. We’re going to build our application in two pieces.
We’re going run the distributed_app on two o our Consul nodes: larry and
curly. We’ll run the distributed_client client on the moe node.
$ mkdir distributed_app
$ cd distributed_app
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
Our Dockerfile installs some required packages including the uWSGI and Sinatra
rameworks as well as a plugin to allow uWSGI to write to Consul. We create a
directory called /opt/distributed_app/ and make it our working directory. We
then add two les, uwsgi-consul.ini and config.ru to that directory.
The uwsgi-consul.ini le congured uWSGI itsel. Let’s look at it now.
[uwsgi]
plugins = consul
socket = 127.0.0.1:9999
master = true
enable-threads = true
[server1]
consul-register = url=http://%h.node.consul:8500,name=
distributed_app,id=server1,port=2001
mule = config.ru
[server2]
consul-register = url=http://%h.node.consul:8500,name=
distributed_app,id=server2,port=2002
mule = config.ru
The uwsgi-consul.ini le uses uWSGI’s Mule construct to run two identical ap-
plications that do ”Hello World” in the Sinatra ramework. Let’s look at those in
the config.ru le.
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
"Hello World!"
end
run Sinatra::Application
url=http://%h.node.consul:8500...
$ mkdir distributed_client
$ cd distributed_client
$ touch Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:16.04
MAINTAINER James Turnbull "[email protected]"
ENV REFRESHED_AT 2016-06-01
WORKDIR /opt/distributed_client
The Dockerfile installs Ruby and some prerequisite packages and gems. It creates
the /opt/distributed_client directory and makes it the working directory. It
copies our client application code, contained in the client.rb le, into the /opt
/distributed_client directory.
require "rubygems"
require "json"
require "net/http"
require "uri"
require "resolv"
uri = URI.parse("http://consul.service.consul:8500/v1/catalog/
service/distributed_app")
while true
if response.body == "{}"
puts "There are no distributed applications registered in
Consul"
sleep(1)
elsif
result = JSON.parse(response.body)
result.each do |service|
puts "Application #{service['ServiceName']} with element #{
service["ServiceID"]} on port #{service["ServicePort"]}
found on node #{service["Node"]} (#{service["Address"]}).
"
dns = Resolv::DNS.new.getresources("distributed_app.service
.consul", Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::A)
puts "We can also resolve DNS - #{service['ServiceName']}
resolves to #{dns.collect { |d| d.address }.join(" and ")
}."
sleep(1)
end
end
Version: v17.03.0 (38f1319) 300
end
Chapter 7: Docker Orchestration and Service Discovery
Our client checks the Consul HTTP API and the Consul DNS or the presence o
a service called distributed_app. It queries the host consul.service.consul
which is the DNS CNAME entry we saw earlier that contains all the A records o
our Consul cluster nodes. This provides us with a simple DNS round robin or our
queries.
I no service is present it puts a message to that efect on the console. I it detects
a distributed_app service then it:
• Parses out the JSON output rom the API call and returns some useul inor-
mation to the console.
• Perorms a DNS lookup or any A records or that service and returns them
to the console.
This will allow us to see the results o launching our distributed_app containers
on our Consul cluster.
Lastly our Dockerfile species an ENTRYPOINT instruction that runs the client.rb
application when the container is started.
Let’s build our image now.
Now we’ve built the required images we can launch our distributed_app applica-
tion container on larry and curly. We’ve assumed that you have Consul running
as we’ve congured it earlier in the chapter. Let’s start by running one application
instance on larry.
. . .
We see a subset o the logs here and that uWSGI has started. The Consul plugin has
constructed a service entry or each distributed_app worker and then registered
them with Consul. I we now look at the Consul web interace we should be able
to see our new services.
I we check the logs and the Consul web interace we should now see more services
registered.
Now we’ve got web application workers running on larry and curly let’s start
our client on moe and see i we can query data rom Consul.
This time we’ve run the jamtur01/distributed_client image on moe and created
an interactive container called moe_distributed_client. It should start emitting
log output like so:
We see that our distributed_client application has queried the HTTP API and
ound service entries or distributed_app and its server1 and server2 workers
on both larry and curly. It has also done a DNS lookup to discover the IP address
o the nodes running that service, 162.243.167.159 and 162.243.170.66.
I this was a real distributed application our client and our workers could take
advantage o this inormation to congure, connect, route between elements o
the distributed application. This provides a simple, easy and resilient way to build
distributed applications running inside separate Docker containers and hosts.
Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm is native clustering or Docker. It turns a pool o Docker hosts
into a single virtual Docker host. Swarm has a simple architecture. It clusters
together multiple Docker hosts and serves the standard Docker API on top o that
cluster. This is incredibly powerul because it moves up the abstraction o Docker
containers to the cluster level without you having to learn a new API. This makes
integration with tools that already support the Docker API easy, including the
standard Docker client. To a Docker client a Swarm cluster is just another Docker
host.
Swarm, like many other Docker tools, ollows a design principle o ”batteries in-
cluded but removable”. This means it ships with tooling and backend integration
or simple use cases and provides an API or integration with more complex tools
and use cases. Swarm is shipped integrated into Docker since Docker 1.12. Prior
to that it was a standalone application licensed with the Apache 2 license.
A swarm is a cluster o Docker hosts onto which you can deploy services. Since
Docker 1.12 the Docker command line tool has included a swarm mode. This
allows the docker binary to create and manage swarms as well as run local con-
tainers.
A swarm is made up o manager and worker nodes. Manager do the dispatching
and organizing o work on the swarm. Each unit o work is called a task. Managers
also handle all the cluster management unctions that keep the swarm healthy and
active. You can have many manager nodes, i there is more than one then the
manager node will conduct an election or a leader.
Worker nodes run the tasks dispatched rom manager nodes. Out o the box, every
node, managers and workers, will run tasks. You can instead congure a swarm
manager node to only perorm management activities and not run tasks.
As a task is a pretty atomic unit swarms use a bigger abstraction, called a service
as a building block. Services dened which tasks are executed on your nodes.
Each service consists o a container image and a series o commands to execute
inside one or more containers on the nodes. You can run services in a number o
modes:
• Global services - a swarm manager dispatches one task or the service on
every available worker.
The swarm also manages load balancing and DNS much like a local Docker host.
Each swarm can expose ports, much like Docker containers publish ports. Like
container ports, These can be automatically or manually dened. The swarm
handles internal DNS much like a Docker host allowing services and workers to
be discoverable inside the swarm.
Installing Swarm
The easiest way to install Swarm is to use Docker itsel. As a result, Swarm doesn’t
have anymore prerequisites than what we saw in Chapter 2. These instructions
assume you’ve installed Docker in accordance with those instructions.
TIP Prior to Docker 1.12, when Swarm was integrated into Docker, you can
use Swarm via a Docker image provided by the Docker Inc team called swarm.
Instructions or installation and usage are available on the Docker Swarm docu-
mentation site.
We’re going to reuse our larry, curly and moe hosts to demonstrate Swarm.
The latest Docker release is already installed on these hosts and we’re going to
turn them into nodes o a Swarm cluster.
Setting up a Swarm
Now let’s create a Swarm cluster. Each node in our cluster runs a Swarm node
agent. Each agent registers its related Docker daemon with the cluster. Also
available is the Swarm manager that we’ll use to manage our cluster. We’re going
to create two cluster workers and a manager on our three hosts.
We also need to make sure some ports are open between all our nodes. We need
to consider the ollowing access:
Port Purpose
2377 Cluster Management
7946 + udp Node communication
4789 + udp Overlay network
We’re going to start with registering a Swarm on our larry node and use this host
as our Swarm manager. We’re again going to need larry’s public IP address. Let’s
make sure it’s still assigned to an environment variable.
You can see we’ve run a docker command: swarm. We’ve then used the init option
to initialize a swarm and the --advertise-addr ag to speciy the management
IP o the new swarm.
We can see the swarm has been started, assigning larry as the swarm manager.
Each swarm has two registration tokens initialized when the swarm begins. One
token or a manager and another or worker nodes. Each type o node can use
this token to join the swarm. We can see one o our tokens:
SWMTKN-1-2mk0wnb9m9cdwhheoysr3pt8orxku8c7k3x3kjjsxatc5ua72v-776
lg9r60gigwb32q329m0dli
You can see that the output rom initializing the swarm has also provided sample
commands or adding workers and managers to the new swarm.
TIP I you ever need to get this token back again then you can run the docker
swarm join-token worker command on the Swarm manager to retrieve it.
Let’s look at the state o our Swarm by running the docker info command.
By enabling a swarm you’ll see a new section in the docker info output.
We can also view inormation on the nodes inside the swarm using the docker
node command.
The docker node command with the ls ag shows the list o nodes in the swarm.
Currently we only have one node larry which is active and shows its role as
Leader o the manager nodes.
Let’s add our curly and moe hosts to the swarm as workers. We can use the
command emitted when we initialized the swarm.
The docker swarm join command takes a token, in our case the worker token,
and the IP address and port o a Swarm manager node and adds that Docker host
to the swarm.
And then again with the same command on the moe node. Now let’s look at our
node list again on the larry host.
Now we can see two more nodes added to our swarm as workers.
With the swarm running, we can now start to run services on it. Remember ser-
vices are a container image and commands that will be executed on our swarm
nodes. Let’s create a simple replica service now. Remember that replica services
run the number o tasks you speciy.
TIP You can nd the ull list o docker service create ags on the Docker
documentation site.
We’ve used the docker service command with the create keyword. This creates
services on our swarm. We’ve used the --name ag to call the service: heyworld.
The heyworld runs the ubuntu image and a while loop that echoes hey world. The
--replicas ag controls how many tasks are run on the swarm. In this case we’re
running two tasks.
Let’s look at our service using the docker service ls command.
This command lists all services in the swarm. We can see that our heyworld service
is running on two replicas. We can inspect the service in urther detail using the
docker service inspect command. We’ve also passed in the --pretty ag to
return the output in an elegant orm.
But we still don’t know where the service running. Let’s look at another command:
docker service ps.
We can see each task, suxed with the task number, and the node it is running
on.
Now, let’s say we wanted to add another task to the service, scaling it up. To do
this we use the docker service scale command.
We speciy the service we want to scale and then the new number o tasks we
want run, here 3. The swarm has then let us know it has scaled. Let’s again check
the running processes.
Here we’ve started a global service called heyworld_global. We’ve specied the
--mode ag with a value o global and run the same ubuntu image and the same
command we ran above.
Let’s see the processes or the heyworld_global service using the docker service
ps command.
We can see that the heyworld_global service is running on every one o our nodes.
I we want to stop a service we can run the docker service rm command.
And we can see that only the heyworld_global service remains running.
TIP Swarm mode also allows or scaling, draining and staged upgrades. You
can nd some examples o this in Docker Swarm tutorial.
As we mentioned earlier, Compose and Consul aren’t the only games in town when
it comes to Docker orchestration tools. There’s a ast growing ecosystem o them.
This is a non-comprehensive list o some o the tools available in that ecosystem.
Not all o them have matching unctionality and broadly all into two categories:
NOTE All o the tools listed are open source under various licenses.
Fleet and etcd are released by the CoreOS team. Fleet is a cluster management tool
and etcd is highly available key value store or shared conguration and service
discovery. Fleet combines systemd and etcd to provide cluster management and
scheduling or containers. Think o it as an extension o systemd that operates at
the cluster level instead o the machine level.
Kubernetes
Apache Mesos
The Apache Mesos project is a highly available cluster management tool. Since
Mesos 0.20.0 it has built-in Docker integration to allow you to use containers with
Mesos. Mesos is popular with a number o startups, notably Twitter and AirBnB.
Helios
The Helios project has been released by the team at Spotiy and is a Docker or-
chestration platorm or deploying and managing containers across an entire eet.
It creates a ”job” abstraction that you can deploy to one or more Helios hosts
running Docker.
Centurion
Summary
In this chapter we’ve introduced you to orchestration with Compose. We’ve shown
you how to add a Compose conguration le to create simple application stacks.
We’ve shown you how to run Compose and build those stacks and how to perorm
basic management tasks on them.
We’ve also shown you a service discovery tool, Consul. We’ve installed Consul
onto Docker and created a cluster o Consul nodes. We’ve also demonstrated how
a simple distributed application might work on Docker.
We also took a look at Docker Swarm as a Docker clustering and scheduling tool.
We saw how to install Swarm, how to manage it and how to schedule workloads
across it.
Finally, we’ve seen some o the other orchestration tools available to us in the
Docker ecosystem.
In the next chapter we’ll look at the Docker API, how we can use it, and how we
can secure connections to our Docker daemon via TLS.
In Chapter 6, we saw some excellent examples o how to run services and build
applications and workow around Docker. One o those examples, the TProv ap-
plication, ocused on using the docker binary on the command line and capturing
the resulting output. This is not an elegant approach to integrating with Docker;
especially when Docker comes with a powerul API you can use to integrate di-
rectly.
In this chapter, we’re going to introduce you to the Docker API and see how to
make use o it. We’re going to take you through binding the Docker daemon on
a network port. We’ll then take you through the API at a high level and hit on
the key aspects o it. We’ll also look at the TProv application we saw in Chapter 6
and rewrite some portions o it to use the API instead o the docker binary. Lastly,
we’ll look at authenticating the API via TLS.
• The Registry API - provides integration with the Docker registry, which
stores our images.
• The Docker Hub API - provides integration with the Docker Hub.
321
Chapter 8: Using the Docker API
• The Docker Remote API - provides integration with the Docker daemon.
All three APIs are broadly RESTul. In this chapter, we’ll ocus on the Remote API
because it is key to any programmatic integration and interaction with Docker.
Let’s explore the Docker Remote API and see its capabilities. Firstly, we need
to remember the Remote API is provided by the Docker daemon. By deault, the
Docker daemons binds to a socket, unix:///var/run/docker.sock, on the host on
which it is running. The daemon runs with root privileges so as to have the access
needed to manage the appropriate resources. As we also discovered in Chapter 2,
i a group named docker exists on your system, Docker will apply ownership o
the socket to that group. Hence, any user that belongs to the docker group can
run Docker without needing root privileges.
WARNING Remember that although the docker group makes lie easier,
it is still a security exposure. The docker group is root-equivalent and should be
limited to those users and applications that absolutely need it.
This works ne i we’re querying the API rom the same host running Docker, but
i we want remote access to the API, we need to bind the Docker daemon to a
network interace. This is done by passing or adjusting the -H ag to the Docker
daemon.
I you want to use the Docker API locally we use the curl command to query it,
like so:
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd --selinux-enabled
To:
This will bind the Docker daemon to all interaces on the host using port 2375.
We then need to reload and restart the daemon using the systemctl command.
TIP You’ll also need to ensure that any rewall on the Docker host or between
you and the host allows TCP communication to the IP address on port 2375.
We now test that this is working using the docker client binary, passing the -H ag
to speciy our Docker host. Let’s connect to our Docker daemon rom a remote
host.
This assumes the Docker host is called docker.example.com; we’ve used the -H
ag to speciy this host. Docker will also honor the DOCKER_HOST environment
variable rather than requiring the continued use o the -H ag.
$ export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://docker.example.com:2375"
Now that we’ve established and conrmed connectivity to the Docker daemon via
the docker binary, let’s try to connect directly to the API. To do so, we’re going to
use the curl command. We’re going to connect to the info API endpoint, which
provides roughly the same inormation as the docker info command.
We see that the API has returned a JSON hash, o which we’ve included a sample,
containing the system inormation or the Docker daemon. This demonstrates that
the Docker API is working and we’re getting some data back. We’ve passed the
JSON through python’s JSON tool to prettiy it.
Let’s start with some API basics: working with Docker images. We’re going to
start by getting a list o all the images on our Docker daemon.
We’ve used the /images/json endpoint, which will return a list o all images on
the Docker daemon. It’ll give us much the same inormation as the docker images
command. We can also query specic images via ID, much like docker inspect
on an image ID.
$ curl http://docker.example.com:2375/images/
b608dbb10e2564f5bd0eef045bf297e56b1149edc70bece54fef4b217261a473
/json | python3 -mjson.tool
{
"Id": "sha256:
b608dbb10e2564f5bd0eef045bf297e56b1149edc70bece54fef4b217261a473
",
"RepoTags": [
"jamtur01/distributed_app:latest"
],
"RepoDigests": [
"jamtur01/distributed_app@sha256:
ecc6b617e9c776d8bd7ed281a55b02e9214d701cad72b9628f5668edfbb86a26
"
],
"Parent": "",
"Comment": "",
"Created": "2016-08-06T12:59:32.957396238Z",
. . .
}
}
$ curl "http://docker.example.com:2375/images/search?term=
jamtur01" | python3 -mjson.tool
[
{
"star_count": 0,
"is_official": false,
"name": "jamtur01/docker-jenkins-sample",
"is_automated": true,
"description": ""
},
{
"star_count": 5,
"is_official": false,
"name": "jamtur01/docker-presentation",
"is_automated": true,
"description": ""
},
. . .
]
Here we’ve searched or all images containing the term jamtur01 and displayed a
subset o the output returned. This is just a sampling o the actions we can take
with the Docker API. We can also build, update, and remove images.
The Docker Remote API also exposes all o the container operations available to
us on the command line. We can list running containers using the /containers
endpoint much as we would with the docker ps command.
$ curl -s "http://docker.example.com:2375/containers/json" |
python3 -mjson.tool
[
{
"Id": "
d580b605fa1bcd210af0d2fe28e50a018f9ea546b56e8b28806d8dc16596340e
",
"Names": [
"/heyworld_global.0.bbctscdrhkro371mkieb0roid"
],
"Image": "ubuntu:latest",
"ImageID": "sha256:42118
e3df429f09ca581a9deb3df274601930e428e452f7e4e9f1833c56a100a
",
"Command": "/bin/sh -c 'while true; do echo hey world;
sleep 1; done'",
"Created": 1470676972,
"Ports": [],
"Labels": {
"com.docker.swarm.node.id": "
c6viix7oja1twnyuc8ez7txhd",
"com.docker.swarm.service.id": "5
k3tw55i050qqh16ob9651pqx",
"com.docker.swarm.service.name": "heyworld_global",
"com.docker.swarm.task": "",
"com.docker.swarm.task.id": "
bbctscdrhkro371mkieb0roid",
"com.docker.swarm.task.name": "heyworld_global.0"
},
"State": "running",
"Status": "Up 11 hours",
"HostConfig": {
"NetworkMode": "default"
Version: v17.03.0 (38f1319) 330
},
. . .
}
]
Chapter 8: Using the Docker API
Our query will show all running containers on the Docker host, in our case, a
single container. To see running and stopped containers, we can add the all ag
to the endpoint and set it to 1.
http://docker.example.com:2375/containers/json?all=1
We can also use the API to create containers by using a POST request to the /
containers/create endpoint. Here is the simplest possible container creation
API call.
Here we’ve specied the Hostname key with a value o jekyll to set the hostname
o the resulting container.
To start the container we use the /containers/start endpoint.
We can also inspect the resulting container via the /containers/ endpoint.
$ curl http://docker.example.com:2375/containers/591
ba02d8d149e5ae5ec2ea30ffe85ed47558b9a40b7405e3b71553d9e59bed3/
json | python3 -mjson.tool
{
"Args": [
"build",
"--destination=/var/www/html"
],
. . .
"Hostname": "591ba02d8d14",
"Image": "jamtur01/jekyll",
. . .
"Id": "591
ba02d8d149e5ae5ec2ea30ffe85ed47558b9a40b7405e3b71553d9e59bed3
",
"Image": "29
d4355e575cff59d7b7ad837055f231970296846ab58a037dd84be520d1cc31
",
. . .
"Name": "/hopeful_davinci",
. . .
}
Here we see we’ve queried our container using the container ID and shown a
sampling o the data available to us.
def create\_instance(name)
cid = `docker run -P --volumes-from #{name} -d -t jamtur01/
tomcat7 2>&1`.chop
[\$?.exitstatus == 0, cid]
end
NOTE You can see the previous TProv code at here or on GitHub.
Pretty crude, eh? We’re directly calling out to the docker binary and capturing its
output. There are lots o reasons that that will be problematic, not least o which
is that you can only run the TProv application somewhere with the Docker client
installed.
We can improve on this interace by using the Docker API via one o its client
libraries, in this case the Ruby Docker-API client library.
TIP You can nd a ull list o the available client libraries here. There are
client libraries or Ruby, Python, Node.JS, Go, Erlang, Java, and others.
Let’s start by looking at how we establish our connection to the Docker API.
require 'docker'
. . .
module TProvAPI
class Application < Sinatra::Base
. . .
We’ve added a require or the docker-api gem. We’d need to install this gem
rst to get things to work or add it to the TProv application’s gem specication.
We can then use the Docker.url method to speciy the location o the Docker
host we wish to use. In our code, we speciy this via an environment variable,
DOCKER_URL, or use a deault o http://localhost:2375.
We’ve also used the Docker.options to speciy options we want to pass to the
Docker daemon connection.
We can test this idea using the IRB shell locally. Let’s try that now. You’ll need
to have Ruby installed on the host on which you are testing. Let’s assume we’re
using a Fedora host.
$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'docker'; require 'pp'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Docker.url = 'http://docker.example.com:2375'
=> "http://docker.example.com:2375"
irb(main):003:0> Docker.options = { :ssl_verify_peer => false }
=> {:ssl_verify_peer=>false}
irb(main):004:0> pp Docker.info
{"Containers"=>9,
"Debug"=>0,
"Driver"=>"aufs",
"DriverStatus"=>[["Root Dir", "/var/lib/docker/aufs"], ["Dirs",
"882"]],
"ExecutionDriver"=>"native-0.2",
. . .
irb(main):005:0> pp Docker.version
{"ApiVersion"=>"1.12",
"Arch"=>"amd64",
"GitCommit"=>"990021a",
"GoVersion"=>"go1.2.1",
"KernelVersion"=>"3.10.0-33-generic",
"Os"=>"linux",
"Version"=>"1.0.1"}
. . .
We’ve launched irb and loaded the docker gem (via a require) and the pp library
to help make our output look nicer. We’ve then specied the Docker.url and
Docker.options methods to set the target Docker host and our required options
(here disabling SSL peer verication to use TLS, but not authenticate the client).
We’ve then run two global methods, Docker.info and Docker.version, which
provide the Ruby client API equivalents o the binary commands docker info
and docker version.
We can now update our TProv container management methods to use the API via
the docker-api client library. Let’s look at some code that does this now.
def create_instance(name)
container = Docker::Container.create('Image' => 'jamtur01/
tomcat7')
container.start('PublishAllPorts' => true, 'VolumesFrom' =>
name)
container.id
end
def delete_instance(cid)
container = Docker::Container.get(cid)
container.kill
end
You can see we’ve replaced the previous binary shell with a rather cleaner
implementation using the Docker API. Our get_war method creates and starts our
jamtur01/fetcher container using the Docker::Container.create and Docker
::Container.start methods. The create_instance method does the same or
the jamtur01/tomcat7 container. Finally, our delete_instance method has been
NOTE You can see the updated TProv code on the book’s site or on GitHub.
Whilst we’ve shown that we can connect to the Docker Remote API, that means
that anyone else can also connect to the API. That poses a bit o a security issue.
The Remote API has an authentication mechanism that has been available since
the 0.9 release o Docker. The authentication uses TLS/SSL certicates to secure
your connection to the API.
TIP This authentication applies to more than just the API. By turning this
authentication on, you will also need to congure our Docker client to support
TLS authentication. We’ll see how to do that in this section, too.
There are a couple o ways we could authenticate our connection, including using
a ull PKI inrastructure, either creating our own Certicate Authority (CA) or
using an existing CA. We’re going to create our own certicate authority because
it is a simple and ast way to get started.
We’re going to quickly step through creating the required CA certicate and key,
as it is a pretty standard process on most platorms. It requires the openssl binary
as a prerequisite.
$ which openssl
/usr/bin/openssl
Let’s create a directory on our Docker host to hold our CA and related materials.
$ cd /etc/docker
$ echo 01 | sudo tee ca.srl
$ sudo openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca-key.pem
Generating RSA private key, 512 bit long modulus
....++++++++++++
.................++++++++++++
e is 65537 (0x10001)
Enter pass phrase for ca-key.pem:
Verifying - Enter pass phrase for ca-key.pem:
We’ll speciy a passphrase or the CA key, make note o this phrase, and secure it.
We’ll need it to create and sign certicates with our new CA.
This also creates a new le called ca-key.pem. This is our CA key; we’ll not want
to share it or lose it, as it is integral to the security o our solution.
Now let’s create a CA certicate.
$ sudo openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca-key.pem -out ca.
pem
Enter pass phrase for ca-key.pem:
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be
incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished
Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:
Locality Name (eg, city) []:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:docker.example.com
Email Address []:
This will create the ca.pem le that is the certicate or our CA. We’ll need this
later to veriy our secure connection.
Now that we have our CA, let’s use it to create a certicate and key or our Docker
server.
We can use our new CA to sign and validate a certicate signing request or CSR
and key or our Docker server. Let’s start with creating a key or our server.
This will create our server key, server-key.pem. As above, we need to keep this
key sae: it is what secures our Docker server.
NOTE Speciy any pass phrase here. We’re going to strip it out beore we
use the key. You’ll only need it or the next couple o steps.
This will create a le called server.csr. This is the request that our CA will sign
to create our server certicate. The most important option here is Common Name or
CN. This should either be the FQDN (ully qualied domain name) o the Docker
server (i.e., what is resolved to in DNS; or example, docker.example.com) or *,
which will allow us to use the server certicate on any server.
We also know olks connect to our host via IP address so we need to congure or
that too.
$ sudo openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -CA ca.pem \
-CAkey ca-key.pem -out server-cert.pem -extfile extfile.cnf
Signature ok
subject=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=*
Getting CA Private Key
Enter pass phrase for ca-key.pem:
We’ll enter the passphrase o the CA’s key le, and a le called server-cert.pem
will be generated. This is our server’s certicate.
Now let’s strip out the passphrase rom our server key. We can’t enter one when
the Docker daemon starts, so we need to remove it.
Now let’s add some tighter permissions to the les to better protect them.
Listing 8.33: Securing the key and certicate on the Docker server
Now that we’ve got our certicate and key, let’s congure the Docker daemon to
use them. As we did to expose the Docker daemon to a network socket, we’re
going to edit its startup conguration. As beore, or Ubuntu or Debian, we’ll edit
the /etc/default/docker le; or those distributions with Upstart, it’s the /etc/
init/docker.conf le. For Red Hat, Fedora, and related distributions, we’ll edit
the /etc/sysconfig/docker le; or those releases with Systemd, it’s the /usr/
lib/systemd/system/docker.service le.
Let’s again assume a Red Hat derivative running Systemd and edit the /usr/lib/
systemd/system/docker.service le:
NOTE You can see that we’ve used port number 2376; this is the deault
TLS/SSL port or Docker. You should only use 2375 or unauthenticated connec-
tions.
This code will enable TLS using the --tlsverify ag. We’ve also specied the lo-
cation o our CA certicate, certicate, and key using the --tlscacert, --tlscert
and --tlskey ags, respectively. There are a variety o other TLS options that we
could also use.
TIP You can use the --tls ag to enable TLS, but not client-side authentica-
tion.
We then need to reload and restart the daemon using the systemctl command.
Our server is now TLS enabled; next, we need to create and sign a certicate and
key to secure our Docker client. Let’s start with a key or our client.
This will create our key le client-key.pem. Again, we’ll need to speciy a tem-
porary passphrase to use during the creation process.
Now let’s create a client CSR.
Replace the Docker daemon host FQDN with the ully-qualied domain name o
your Docker daemon host.
We next need to enable client authentication or our key by adding some extended
SSL attributes.
$ sudo openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in client.csr -CA ca.pem \
-CAkey ca-key.pem -out client-cert.pem -extfile extfile.cnf
Signature ok
subject=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd
Getting CA Private Key
Enter pass phrase for ca-key.pem:
Again, we use the CA key’s passphrase and generate another certicate: client-
cert.pem.
Finally, we strip the passphrase rom our client-key.pem le to allow us to use
it with the Docker client.
Next let’s congure our Docker client to use our new TLS conguration. We need
to do this because the Docker daemon now expects authenticated connections or
both the client and the API.
We’ll need to copy our ca.pem, client-cert.pem, and client-key.pem les to the
host on which we’re intending to run the Docker client.
TIP Remember that these keys provide root-level access to the Docker dae-
mon. You should protect them careully.
Let’s install them into the .docker directory. This is the deault location where
Docker will look or certicates and keys. Docker will specically look or key.
pem, cert.pem, and our CA certicate: ca.pem.
Listing 8.41: Copying the key and certicate on the Docker client
$ mkdir -p ~/.docker/
$ cp ca.pem ~/.docker/ca.pem
$ cp client-key.pem ~/.docker/key.pem
$ cp client-cert.pem ~/.docker/cert.pem
$ chmod 0600 ~/.docker/key.pem ~/.docker/cert.pem
Now let’s test the connection to the Docker daemon rom the client. To do this,
we’re going to use the docker info command.
We see that we’ve specied the -H ag to tell the client to which host it should
connect. We could instead speciy the host using the DOCKER_HOST environment
variable i we didn’t want to speciy the -H ag each time. We’ve also specied the
--tlsverify ag, which enables our TLS connection to the Docker daemon. We
don’t need to speciy any certicate or key les, because Docker has automatically
looked these up in our ~/.docker/ directory. I we did need to speciy these les,
we could with the --tlscacert, --tlscert, and --tlskey ags.
So what happens i we don’t speciy a TLS connection? Let’s try again now without
the --tlsverify ag.
Ouch. That’s not good. I you see an error like this, you know you’ve probably not
enabled TLS on the connection, you’ve not specied the right TLS conguration,
or you have an incorrect certicate or key.
Assuming you’ve got everything working, you should now have an authenticated
Docker connection!
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve been introduced to the Docker Remote API. We’ve also seen
how to secure the Docker Remote API via SSL/TLS certicates. We’ve explored the
Docker API and how to use it to manage images and containers. We’ve also seen
how to use one o the Docker API client libraries to rewrite our TProv application
to directly use the Docker API.
In the next and last chapter, we’ll look at how you can contribute to Docker.
Docker is in its inancy -- sometimes things go wrong. This chapter will talk about:
You’ll nd out where to nd Docker olks and the best way to ask or help. You’ll
also learn how to engage with Docker’s developer community: there’s a huge
amount o development efort surrounding Docker with hundreds o committers
in the open-source community. I you’re excited by Docker, then it’s easy to make
your own contribution to the project. This chapter will also cover the basics o
contributing to the Docker project, how to build a Docker development environ-
ment, and how to create a good pull request.
NOTE This chapter assumes some basic amiliarity with Git, GitHub, and
Go, but doesn’t assume you’re a ully edged developer.
353
Chapter 9: Getting help and extending Docker
Getting help
The Docker community is large and riendly. Most Docker olks congregate in
three places:
NOTE Docker, Inc. also sells enterprise support or Docker. You can nd
the inormation on the Support page.
Docker on IRC
The Docker community also has two strong IRC channels: #docker and #docker-
dev. Both are on the Freenode IRC network
The #docker channel is generally or user help and general Docker issues, whereas
#docker-dev is where contributors to Docker’s source code gather.
Docker on GitHub
Docker (and most o its components and ecosystem) is hosted on GitHub. The
principal repository or Docker itsel is https://github.com/docker/docker/.
Other repositories o note are:
Let’s start with the basics around submitting issues and patches and interacting
with the Docker community. When reporting issues with Docker, it’s important to
be an awesome open-source citizen and provide good inormation that can help
the community resolve your issue. When you log a ticket, please remember to
include the ollowing background inormation:
Then provide a detailed explanation o your problem and the steps others can take
to reproduce it.
I you’re logging a eature request, careully explain what you want and how you
propose it might work. Think careully about generic use cases: is your eature
something that will make lie easier or just you or or everyone?
Please take a moment to check that an issue doesn’t already exist documenting
your bug report or eature request. I it does, you can add a quick ”+1” or ”I have
this problem too”, or i you eel your input expands on the proposed implementa-
tion or bug x, then add a more substantive update.
To make it easier to contribute to Docker, we’re going to show you how to build
a development environment. The development environment provides all o the
required dependencies and build tooling to work with Docker.
Install Docker
You must rst install Docker in order to get a development environment, because
the build environment is a Docker container in its own right. We use Docker to
build and develop Docker. Use the steps rom Chapter 2 to install Docker on your
local host. You should install the most recent version o Docker available.
Next, you need to install Make and Git so that we can check out the Docker source
code and run the build process. The source code is stored on GitHub, and the build
process is built around a Makefile.
On Ubuntu, we would install the git package.
Now let’s check out the Docker source code (or, i you’re working on another
component, the relevant source code repository) and change into the resulting
directory.
You can now work on the source code and x bugs, update documentation, and
write awesome eatures!
One o the great ways anyone, even i you’re not a developer or skilled in Go, can
contribute to Docker is to update, enhance, or develop new documentation. The
Docker documentation lives on the Docs website. The source documentation, the
theme, and the tooling that generates this site are stored in the Docker repo on
GitHub.
You can nd specic guidelines and a basic style guide or the documentation at:
• https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/docs/README.md.
$ cd docker
$ make docs
. . .
docker run --rm -it -e AWS_S3_BUCKET -p 8000:8000 "docker-docs:
master" mkdocs serve
Running at: http://0.0.0.0:8000/
Live reload enabled.
Hold ctrl+c to quit.
You can then browse to a local version o the Docker documentation on port 8000.
I you want to contribute to Docker Engine, you can now use make and Docker
to build the development environment. The Docker source code ships with a
Dockerfile that we use to install all the build and runtime dependencies necessary
to build and test Docker.
TIP This command will take some time to complete when you rst execute
it. It might require a host with at least 2Gb o RAM to also run the development
build.
will upload the current source directory as build context or a Docker image, build
the image containing Go and any other required dependencies, and then launch
a container rom this image.
Using this development image, we also create a Docker binary to test any xes or
eatures. We do this using the make tool again.
This command will create a docker and dockerd binary in a volume at ./bundles
/<version>-dev/binary-client/ and ./bundles/<version>-dev/binary-daemon
/ respectively. For example, we would create a client binary and associated check-
sums like so:
$ ls -l bundles/1.13.0-dev/binary-client/
total 15344
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Aug 9 13:59 docker -> docker-
1.13.0-dev
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15700192 Aug 9 13:59 docker-1.13.0-dev
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 52 Aug 9 13:59 docker-1.13.0-dev.
md5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 84 Aug 9 13:59 docker-1.13.0-dev.
sha256
You can then use this binary or live testing by running it instead o the local
Docker daemon. To do so, we need to stop Docker and run this new binary instead.
This will run the development Docker daemon interactively. You can also back-
ground the daemon i you wish.
We can then test the docker binary by running it against this daemon.
$ ~/docker/bundles/1.13.0-dev/binary-client/docker version
Client:
Version: 1.13.0-dev
API version: 1.25
Go version: go1.6.3
Git commit: 04e021d
Built: Tue Aug 9 13:58:52 2016
OS/Arch: linux/amd64
Server:
Version: 1.13.0-dev
API version: 1.25
Go version: go1.6.3
Git commit: 04e021d
Built: Tue Aug 9 13:58:52 2016
OS/Arch: linux/amd64
You can see that we’re running a 1.13.0-dev client, this binary, against the 1.13.0
-dev daemon we just started. You can use this combination to test and ensure any
changes you’ve made to the Docker source are working correctly.
It’s also important to ensure that all o the Docker tests pass beore contributing
code back upstream. To execute all the tests, you need to run this command:
This command will again upload the current source as build context to an image
and then create a development image. A container will be launched rom this
image, and the test will run inside it. Again, this may take some time or the
initial build.
I the tests are successul, then the end o the output should look something like
this:
. . .
[PASSED]: save - save a repo using stdout
[PASSED]: load - load a repo using stdout
[PASSED]: save - save a repo using -o
[PASSED]: load - load a repo using -i
[PASSED]: tag - busybox -> testfoobarbaz
[PASSED]: tag - busybox's image ID -> testfoobarbaz
[PASSED]: tag - busybox fooo/bar
[PASSED]: tag - busybox fooaa/test
[PASSED]: top - sleep process should be listed in non privileged
mode
[PASSED]: top - sleep process should be listed in privileged mode
[PASSED]: version - verify that it works and that the output is
properly formatted
PASS
PASS github.com/docker/docker/integration-cli 178.685s
TIP You can use the $TESTFLAGS environment variable to pass in arguments
to the test run.
You can also launch an interactive session inside the newly built development
container:
I you’re happy with your documentation update, bug x, or new eature, you
can submit a pull request or it on GitHub. To do so, you should ork the Docker
repository and make changes on your ork in a eature branch:
You should always submit unit tests or your changes. Take a look at the existing
tests or inspiration. You should also always run the ull test suite on your branch
beore submitting a pull request.
Any pull request with a eature in it should include updates to the documentation.
You should use the process above to test your documentation changes beore you
submit your pull request. There are also specic guidelines (as we mentioned
above) or documentation that you should ollow.
We have some other simple rules that will help get your pull request reviewed and
merged quickly:
• Pull requests must not contain commits rom other users or branches.
• Commit messages must start with a capitalized and short summary (50 char-
acters maximum) written in the imperative, ollowed by an optional, more
detailed explanatory text that is separated rom the summary by an empty
line.
• Squash your commits into logical units o work using git rebase -i and
git push -f. Include documentation changes in the same commit so that a
revert would remove all traces o the eature or x.
Lastly, the Docker project uses a Developer Certicate o Origin to veriy that you
wrote any code you submit or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-
source patch. You can read about why we do this at http://blog.docker.com/
2014/01/docker-code-contributions-require-developer-certificate-of-origin/.
The certicate is easy to apply. All you need to do is add a line to each Git
commit message.
NOTE You must use your real name. We do not allow pseudonyms or
anonymous contributions or legal reasons.
There are several small exceptions to the signing requirement. Currently these
are:
It’s also pretty easy to automate the signing o your Git commits using the git
commit -s command.
NOTE The signing script expects to nd your GitHub user name in git
config --get github.user. You can set this option with the git config --set
github.user username command.
Once you’ve submitted your pull request, it will be reviewed, and you will po-
tentially receive eedback. Docker uses a maintainer system much like the Linux
kernel. Each component inside Docker is managed by one or more maintainers
who are responsible or ensuring the quality, stability, and direction o that com-
ponent. The maintainers are supplemented by Docker’s benevolent dictator and
chie maintainer, Solomon Hykes. He’s the only one who can override a main-
tainer, and he has sole responsibility or appointing new maintainers.
Docker maintainers use the shorthand LGTM (or Looks Good To Me) in comments
on the code review to indicate acceptance o a pull request. A change requires
LGTMs rom an absolute majority o the maintainers o each component afected
by the changes (or or documentation - a minimum o two maintainers). I a
change afects docs/ and registry/, then it needs two maintainers o docs/ and
an absolute majority o the maintainers o registry/.
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve learned about how to get help with Docker and the places
where useul Docker community members and developers hang out. We’ve also
learned about the best way to log an issue with Docker, including the sort o
inormation you need to provide to get the best response.
We’ve also seen how to set up a development environment to work on the Docker
source or documentation and how to build and test inside this environment to
ensure your x or eature works. Finally, we’ve learned about how to create a
properly structured and good-quality pull request with your update.
367
List o Figures
369
Listings
2.24 Ensuring the Docker daemon starts at boot on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.25 Starting the Docker daemon on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 . . . . . 30
2.26 Ensuring the Docker daemon starts at boot on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.27 Checking Docker is installed on the Red Hat amily . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.28 Downloading the Docker or Mac DMG le . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.29 Testing Docker or Mac on OS X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.30 Downloading the Docker or Windows .MSI le . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.31 Testing Docker or Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.32 Testing or curl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.33 Installing curl on Ubuntu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.34 Installing curl on Fedora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.35 Installing Docker rom the installation script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.36 Downloading the Docker binary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.37 Changing Docker daemon networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.38 Using the DOCKER_HOST environment variable . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.39 Binding the Docker daemon to a diferent socket . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.40 Binding the Docker daemon to multiple places . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.41 Turning on Docker daemon debug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.42 The systemd override le . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.43 Checking the status o the Docker daemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.44 Starting and stopping Docker with Upstart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.45 Starting and stopping Docker on Red Hat and Fedora . . . . . . . . 42
2.46 The Docker daemon isn’t running . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.47 Upgrade docker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.1 Checking that the docker binary works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.2 Running our rst container . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.3 The docker run command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.4 Our rst container’s shell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.5 Checking the container’s hostname . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.6 Checking the container’s /etc/hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.7 Checking the container’s interaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.8 Checking container’s processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.9 Installing a package in our rst container . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
383
Index
Docker Hub, 74, 79, 126, 128, 321 CMD, 213, 223
Logging in, 82 DSL, 86
Private repositories, 126 ENTRYPOINT, 209, 213, 223, 227,
Docker Hub Enterprise, 74 236, 238, 240, 276, 297
Docker Inc, 7, 77, 354 ENV, 212
Docker Machine, 31, 33 exec ormat, 89
Docker Networking, 162, 170 EXPOSE, 140, 212, 227
bridge, 172 RUN, 141
documentation, 181 template, 95
overlay, 172 VOLUME, 209, 212, 223, 237, 276
docker run WORKDIR, 209, 223, 224
-h, 279 DockerUI, 43
Docker Swarm, 255 Documentation, 357
Docker Trusted Registry, 74 dotCloud, 7
Docker user interaces Drone, 206
DockerUI, 43
Shipyard, 43 EPEL, 27
docker-compose exec ormat, 89
kill, 270 Fedora, 26
logs, 269 Fluentd, 60
ps, 268 Forum, 354
rm, 270
start, 270 GELF, 60
stop, 269 Getting help, 354
up, 264 GitHub, 128
Docker-in-Docker, 229 gomt, 363
docker0, 162, 163, 172 Golden image, 14
DOCKER_HOST, 39, 325, 351
HTTP_PROXY, 40, 133
DOCKER_HOST, 267
HTTPS_PROXY, 40, 133
dockerd, 38
Dockerle, 86, 123, 128, 136, 139, 144, Image management, 14
150, 159, 183, 192, 193, 198, iptables, 166
208, 209, 211, 213, 222, 226, IPv6, 163
233, 237–239, 248, 358 IRC, 354
ADD, 140, 142, 234, 249
logging, 247
ZFS, 20