I have containerized an application which is comprised of a Node.js application, Nginx, and MongoDB. I'm currently using Docker Compose to start and stop the application on my development machine.
I'd like to distribute the application, along with the volume that contains the MongoDB database files, so that an end user can easily start the application on their computer and point their web browser to it.
Some factors I'm considering:
The end user is almost certainly not familiar with containerization and is probably not comfortable playing around in a terminal.
The end user is likely to be using macOS or Windows, but Linux should be supported.
Asking the user to install Docker is possible, but I don't like that it requires Hyper-V on Windows, which conflicts with other software such as VirtualBox.
I could write a cross-platform GUI application that manages Docker with simple "start" and "stop" buttons. However, I am not married to using Docker if there is an easier path forward. Should I look into something like Facebook's executable archives?
Related
New to Emacs and recently been trying to get used to it. loving it so far!
One thing I cannot seem to figure out by myself nor find any proper examples of how to figure out to following workflow:
Since I work on multiple projects with different languages and like to keep my work and private projects separated as much as possible in my OS, ive been working with development containers using docker and VScode for the past years.
This allowed me to keep both my project dependencies and the development tools in one container, where i just attached my VScode instance to a project and used extensions such as Language servers / linting / debugging from within that container.
Currently I can open my projects in emacs as the code is local and mounted to the containers, but im looking for a way to either:
Allow my local emacs to use the language/linting/debugging services installed in the container.
Install emacs in the dev containers and mount my configs to keep this synchronized.
Or better alternatives?
Most valuable would be to get language servers working again.
In case it matters, i'm working in DOOM Emacs on Arch. Mostly Python, PHP and NodeJS projects.
... use the language/linting/debugging services installed in the container
By design this is difficult to do with Docker: by design the host system can't directly access files or binaries installed in a container. Without a lot of tricks around bind mounts and user IDs and paths and permissions it's very difficult to run a program in a container in a way that looks like it's on the host system. A couple of tools have those tricks built in, but it's not at all universal. (Jenkins for example generates about 5 lines' worth of docker run command options if you ask it to run a step inside a container.)
My Emacs experience has generally been much better using a host-based per-language version manager and per-project packaging tool (a per-project node_modules directory, rbenv plus Ruby gem sets, pipenv for Python programs, ...).
In short: Emacs can't use language servers, language interpreters, or other tools from Docker images instead of the host system (without writing a lot of Lisp (and if you do consider publishing it to MELPA (and also to GitHub))).
Most valuable would be to get language servers working again.
M-x lsp-install-server will download one of the language servers lsp-mode knows about and save it in your $HOME/.emacs directory. If you activate lsp-mode and it doesn't already have a language server for the current major mode, it will offer to download it for you. There's not much to "get working" usually.
I am using cygwin under windows server 2008 to have linux capability (to some degree) and ssh and be able to run apps without using a gui.
On another server that is ubuntu 18.04 I use containers to some how isolate my apps so that when I run an app and it spawns child processes and probabley modifies file descriptors etc (and so now I can not keep track of which processes are running now) I can stop my app and all the mess that it has done, with just stopping the container.
Containers made starting and stopping an app a clean and simple way.
Is there any way to have such thing on windows (without using docker on windows)? by saying this I mean the file and process isolation and not network or other stuff.
Is it possible to only isolate processes so that i can get rid of them with a single command?
Is there any tool for that? particularly for cygwin under windows?
I don't know about other languages but if you're using Python, it has a feature called Virtual Environment and developer can create and run applications in isolated environments. you can learn more about it here.
I myself come to the conclusion that using services and creating a service in windows would be the only way to manage an app without using a container.
I currently have a LAMP stack installed on my mac running through Homebrew, which, to be honest hardly ever get's used.
Lately I have been working a lot with AngularJS and service based apps, so generally run the sites through a gulp / nodeJS based webserver.
I am totally frontend orientated, so very rarely do I play with backend related technologies other than the odd Drupal site and mysql.
I am interested to learn more NodeJS, perhaps even some Ruby, purely to understand programming more - not really for it to become my new job description.
So reading up on NodeJS a bit last night I read a lot about Docker, and installed it the toolkit and gui this morning. It looks pretty neat!
My question is: Would it work better for me to just run everything I need through Docker? For example, I can just install the mysql container, and turn it on when I need a db, and just spin up a drupal instance when I need one and connect it to my db instance?
I understand that running Docker on Mac is slower as it doesn't have the native Linux kernel and runs through a VM - but considering my needs from it, this should be okay?
I love the idea of just deploying containers, so will probably want to install Docker on my hosting environment too (VM in the cloud).
Follow up question: 90% of the sites I work on are AngularJS based frontends that speak to APIs that our backend guys build separately. Would it be overkill to have a Docker for each of those sites, or would I rather just run them all in one, or just bypass docker entirely for that (as I mentioned, I normally just load them up from within my Gulp's webserver)
Thanks a lot. I realise this is a n00b asking questions about big technology, but I'm trying to wrap my head around it and hopefully grow a bit in the process.
The interest in deploying Docker container is reproducibility.
You can easily reproduce:
either a complex development environment requiring the installation of numerous libraries (that you don't want to pollute directly your host)
or an execution environment, for a given tool to run (like a web server)
If you are not likely to repeat a setup (for dev or exec), a docker container would bring little value.
But if you want to keep track of the exact specification of an environment (through its Dockerfile) and will deploy it not just on your workstation, but in other places as well, then docker is certainly a good option to consider.
Due to a hardware issue, I had to change my work station to another Mac for a few weeks.
It took me a couple of hours to setup everything: Android Studio, git, Apache, MySql, etc...
Could I use a docker image to bundle all my development tools ?
(My goal is to have a "backup" of my development environment that I could start running right away on another machine)
Could I use a docker image to bundle all my development tools ?
That means all your dev tools would be Linux tools working in Linux container, on a Linux host.
You would need to provide that Linux host (on your Mac) through a boot2docker Virtual Machine.
But that also mean you could not directly type "git" from a Mac shell, you would need to connect to your VM first in order to launch your 'git' container and run dome docker run --name=git commands.
So no, this doesn't seem to be a good fit for your backup plan on Mac.
Not necessarily. It kinda depends what you are looking for in a development environment.
I do use it for part of my dev env though.
Vagrant + Docker
My personal approach is to rely on Vagrant to fire up a bunch of environments, some of which being full-fledged VMs and others being lightweight containers.
This is a rather controversial approach though, many people would not agree with it, as the tools overlap, both in terms of platform capability and provisioning.
Docker Containers for 3rd Party Services
My personal approach for this is to use Vagrant to fire up a bunch of different VMs, where one is my main dev VM with tools I use for development (IDEs, editors, SCM tools, etc...), and the rest are Docker containers for 3rd party apps that relate to my daily activities (IRC client, database servers like MySQL or MongoDB, etc...).
This fits my cycle decently as these types of tools (like databases) are not something you generally interact with directly through a tty, but something I'd rather connect to with another tool via an API. So I don't need direct access to them, and I do want them to be isolated and easy to jumpstart and dispose of when I jump between projects.
So, docker containers fit part of my idea of a dev environment, but not necessarily all of it.
Just my use case though. Hope it helps.
Shameless plug: Docker Shell
This tool lets you set up a uniform cross platform development environment inside a docker container.
http://dockershell.io/
I have built a rails app which is used as a standalone enterprise application. The application needs to run on Windows desktops (entire user base runs Windows machines). I am able to run it quite successfully on an Ubuntu machine but it's not something customers will prefer to run.
Since deploying on a windows machine is quite messy AFAIK. I would like deploy it on Windows using a virtual machine (VirtualBox).
Requirements would be -
Application installation on Windows 7 / Windows 8.
User should be able to access rails server by browser running on his/her system via localhost or any other IP address.
Application should auto-start when user reboots the machine.
Ideally user should be able to download and install the software on his/her machine by himself/herself.
I am working to make this work but would like to know the feasibility of this solution. Would like to if I am getting the concepts wrongs or if there is something which is simply not possible or is not making any sense.
Take a look at Vagrant, which is a highly scriptable VM host. You can then generate batch files to automatically start the VM on boot.
To deploy new code, you'll just want to provide them with a new VM image they can copy into your app directory.
That said, I agree with other comments that this might not be the right platform for your use case. The main reason for building web apps is so that many clients can use your app over the web using just one set of servers. Deploying a web server to each client seems like it's defeating that advantage.