Tao of Mac

Sep 2nd 2013 · 2 min read

Docker

The new hotness in the Linux container space (because nobody remembers LXC anymore).

Resources

Category Date Link Notes
Base Images 2015 gliderlabs/alpine

A minimal Alpine Linux base image
phusion/baseimage-docker

an arguably sane Ubuntu base image
CLI codekitchen/dinghy

a nice wrapper that sets up a host NFS server and other niceties
Wharfee

a nice CLI wrapper
2014 dockersh

Segregate logged in users into different containers
Distros 2013 Core OS

a lightweight distro focused on containers, since acquired by RedHat
GUI 2016 Portainer

a simple NodeJS Web UI
2015 Portus

A registry front-end that works with the v2 registry and has some user management features.
2014 Seagull

A Web UI for container management
Mac Alternatives 2021 podman-macos

a menubar item to manage podman machine, which is in turn available on Homebrew
lima

a possible replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac
2019 boot2docker-xhyve

a clean way to run Docker inside Hypervisor.framework
Network 2018 pipework

map physical interfaces to specific containers
2015 socketplane

Auto-discovery and OVS for inter-host traffic
2014 weave

inter-host tunneling, with encryption
OCI Tools 2019 docker-slim

performs simple runtime analysis to remove unnecessary libraries and slim down images
2018 buildah

a CLI tool for builting OCI container images from Dockerfiles
Orchestration 2015 Kubernetes

The current industry favorite
Rancher

Still arguably one of the nicer options in 2018
Other runtimes 2022 nerdctl

can be used to manage containers in containerd/k3s
2019 podman

aims for 1:1 CLI parity (see also Buildah and Skopeo)
2018 Singularity

a different take on containers, not quite OCI compliant
PaaS 2020 CapRover

a nice web front-end for Docker Swarm
Tools 2024 lazydocker

a nice TUI for Docker management, with usage charts and easy stack/compose viewing (Portainer for terminals)
2023 distrobox

a nice wrapper for sandbox management
colima

a macOS VM container manager that replaces Docker desktop and works well with brew.

Setting up boot2docker manually on Parallels

Since I don’t have Parallels Pro, I run Docker on my older Macs like this:

  • Download a recent release and put the ISO someplace safe
  • Create a new VM manually by dragging the ISO to Parallels (use the Shared or NAT network type)
  • After first boot, use fdisk to create a primary partition in /dev/sda and format it using mkfs.ext4 -L boot2docker-data /dev/sda1
  • Reboot so that it gets mounted and used for certificate storage
  • Do brew install docker (which gets you the CLI)
  • Set up port forwarding for port 2376 and a local port to the VM’s SSH port
  • SSH into the VM (docker/tcuser) and copy the *.pem files from /var/lib/boot2docker/tls to your ~/.docker folder
  • Set and export DOCKER_HOST and DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY accordingly:
export DOCKER_HOST=localhost:2376
export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1

Useful Dockerfile Snippets

Base Image Description Dockerfile snippet
Ubuntu Installing the Oracle JDK (and setting the EULA) 
RUN echo oracle-java8-installer shared/accepted-oracle-license-v1-1 select true | debconf-set-selections \
 && add-apt-repository -y ppa:webupd8team/java \
 && apt-get install -y java-common oracle-java8-installer oracle-java8-set-default \
 && rm -rf /var/cache/oracle-jdk8-installer

Building The Docker Registry From Scratch (on ARM, too!)

Very simple, really, once you have installed. Quite quick on a 2, too:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH
# this fetches godep and golint
go get github.com/tools/godep github.com/golang/lint/golint
# this fetches and builds the registry
go get github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry
# test it with the default config
$GOPATH/bin/registry $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry/config.yml

Restarting a Container Automatically in Docker Compose

Since watchtower only does updates and not restarts (which seems like a missed opportunity), this simple snippet will restart a container at a specific time every day:

version: "3"
services:

  myservice:
    container_name: myservice

  restarter:
    image: docker:cli
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes: ["/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"]
    entrypoint: ["/bin/sh","-c"]
    command:
      - |
        while true; do
          current_epoch=$$(date +%s)
          target_epoch=$$(( $$(date -d "05:00" +%s) + 86400 ))
          sleep_seconds=$$(( target_epoch - current_epoch ))
          echo "$$(date) + $$sleep_seconds seconds"
          sleep $$sleep_seconds

          docker restart myservice
        done