Docker container does not run crontab - docker

I have a dockerfile image based on ubuntu. Iam trying to make a bash script run each day but the cron never runs. When the container is running, i check if cron is running and it is. the bash script works perfectly and the crontab command is well copied inside the container. i can't seem to find where the problem is coming from.
Here is the Dockerfile:
FROM snipe/snipe-it:latest
ENV TZ=America/Toronto
RUN apt-get update \
&& apt-get install awscli -y \
&& apt-get clean \
&& apt-get install cron -y \
&& rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
RUN mkdir /var/www/html/backups_scripts /var/www/html/config/scripts
COPY config/crontab.txt /var/www/html/backups_scripts
RUN /usr/bin/crontab /var/www/html/backups_scripts/crontab.txt
COPY config/scripts/backups.sh /var/www/html/config/scripts
CMD ["cron","-f"]
The last command CMD doesn't work. And as soon as i remove the cmd command i get this message when i check the cron task inside the container:
root#fcfb6052274a:/var/www/html# /etc/init.d/cron status
* cron is not running
Even if i start the cron process before the crontab, the crontab is still not launched
This dockerfile is called by a docker swarm file (compose file type). Maybe the cron must be activated with the compose file.
How can i tackle this problem ??? Thank you

You need to approach this differently, as you have to remember that container images and containers are not virtual machines. They're a single process that starts and is maintained through its lifecycle. As such, background processes (like cron) don't exist in a container.
What I've seen most people do is have the container just execute whatever you're looking for it to do on a job like do_the_thing.sh and then using the docker run command on on the host machine to call it via cron.
So for sake of argument, let's say you had an image called myrepo/task with a default entrypoint of do_the_thing.sh
On the host, you could add an entry to crontab:
# m h dom mon dow user command
0 */2 * * * root docker run --rm myrepo/task
Then it's down to a question of design. If the task needs files, you can pass them down via volume. If it needs to put something somewhere when it's done, maybe look at blob storage.

I think this question is a duplicate, with a detailed response with lots of upvotes here. I followed the top-most dockerfile example without issues.
Your CMD running cron in the foreground isn't the problem. I ran a quick version of your docker file and exec'ing into the container I could confirm cron was running. Recommend checking how your cron entries in the crontab file are re-directing their output.
Expanding on one of the other answers here a container is actually a lot like a virtual machine, and often they do run many processes concurrently. If you happen to have any other containers running you might be able to see this most easily by running docker stats and looking at the PID column.
Also, easy to examine interactively yourself like this:
$ # Create a simple ubuntu running container named my-ubuntu
$ docker run -it -h my-ubuntu ubuntu
root#my-ubuntu$ ps aw # Shows bash and ps processes running.
root#my-ubuntu$ # Launch a ten minute sleep in the background.
root#my-ubuntu$ sleep 600 &
root#my-ubuntu$ ps aw # Now shows sleep also running.

Related

Running cron in a docker container on a windows host

I am having some problems trying to make a container that runs a cronjob. I can see cron running using top in the container but it doesn't write to the log file as the below example attempts to. The file stays empty.
I have read answers to the same question here:
How to run a cron job inside a docker container?
Output of `tail -f` at the end of a docker CMD is not showing
But I could not make any of the suggestions work. For example I used the dockerfile from here: https://github.com/Ekito/docker-cron/
FROM ubuntu:latest
MAINTAINER docker#ekito.fr
# Add crontab file in the cron directory
ADD crontab /etc/cron.d/hello-cron
# Give execution rights on the cron job
RUN chmod 0644 /etc/cron.d/hello-cron
# Create the log file to be able to run tail
RUN touch /var/log/cron.log
#Install Cron
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install cron
# Run the command on container startup
CMD cron && tail -f /var/log/cron.log
crontab:
* * * * * root echo "Hello world" >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1
# Don't remove the empty line at the end of this file. It is required to run the cron job
It didn't work on my machine (windows 10). Apparently there seems to be a windows specific issue also reported by someone else: https://github.com/Ekito/docker-cron/issues/3
To test if it was just me doing something wrong I tried to do the same in a virtual machine running ubuntu (so an ubuntu host instead of my windows host) and that worked as expected. The log file is extended as expected.
So what can I do to try to make this work?
I tried writing to a mounted (bind) folder and making a volume to write to. Neither worked.
rferalli's answer on the github issue did the trick for me:
"Had the same issue. Fixed it by changing line ending of the crontab file from CRLF to LF. Hope this helps!"
I have this problem too.
My workaround is to use Task Scheduler to run a .bat file that start a container instead
Using Task Scheduler: https://active-directory-wp.com/docs/Usage/How_to_add_a_cron_job_on_Windows.html
hello.bat
docker run hello-world
TaskScheduler Action
cmd /c hello.bat >> hello.log 2>&1
Hope this help :)

Start Node manager in Weblogic (Docker) using script.

I tried to dockerize weblogic server. Now I am facing a issue with Starting node manager after server is started inside the docker container. My docker file as below.
FROM oracle/weblogic:12.1.3-generic
ENV JAVA_OPTIONS="${JAVA_OPTIONS} -
Dweblogic.nodemanager.SecureListener=false" \
ADMIN_PORT="7001" \
ADMIN_HOST="localhost"
USER oracle
COPY dockerfiles/keyStore/keystore_ss.jks /u01/oracle/keystore/
COPY dockerfiles/patch/* /u01/oracle/patch/
COPY dockerfiles/local_domainScripts /u01/oracle/local_domainScripts/
COPY dockerfiles/scripts/* /u01/oracle/
COPY dockerfiles/applicationFiles/ /u01/oracle/applicationFiles/
USER root
RUN yum install -y procps
RUN chmod +x startWeblogic.sh
USER oracle
RUN /u01/oracle/wlst /u01/oracle/local_domainScripts/config.py
RUN nohup bash -c "/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/local_domain/bin/startNodeManager.sh &" && sleep 4
CMD ["/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/local_domain/startWebLogic.sh"]
This will create weblogic server instance. I want to start node manager after this server is started.
Run command:
docker run -d --name wls_local_domain --network=host --hostname localhost -p 7001:7001 test-docker:0-SNAPSHOT
When ./startNodeManager.sh is executed inside the container that will start the node manager. To start the node manager, weblogic server need to be started first.
I want to this using bash script. I tried this one but it didn't help
github link
You can't (usefully) RUN a background process. That Dockerfile command launches an intermediate container executing the RUN command, saves its filesystem, and exits; there is no process running any more by the time the next Dockerfile command executes.
If this is a commercially maintained image, you might look into whether Oracle has intstructions on how to use it. (From clicking around, none of the samples there start a node manager; is it necessary?)
Best practice is generally to run only one server in a Docker container (and ideally in the foreground and as the container's main process). If that will work and there aren't shared filesystem dependencies, you can split all of this except the final CMD into one base Dockerfile, then have two additional Dockerfiles that just have a FROM line pointing at your mostly-built image and a requested CMD.
If that really won't work then you'll have to fall back to running some init system in your container, typically supervisord.
You need to start the node manager as a background process then start the server. In order to keep alive the docker container while you are running the background processes, you can use the tail command.
This is how I start the node managed and the WebLogic server in my container:
#!/bin/bash
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# start the Node Manager
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
function startNodeManager() {
echo "starting the node manager for $MANAGED_SERVER_NAME server..."
"$ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/bin/startNodeManager.sh" &
while ! nc -z "$HOSTNAME" "$NODE_MANAGER_PORT"; do
sleep 0.5
done
echo "node manager is up and ready to receive requests"
}
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# start the WebLogic Admin server
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
function startAdminServer() {
echo "starting the $ADMIN_SERVER_NAME server..."
local logHome
logHome="$ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/servers/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME/logs"
mkdir -p "$logHome"
"$ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/bin/startWebLogic.sh" > "$logHome/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME.out" 2>&1 &
}
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# main app starts here
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
startNodeManager
startAdminServer
# this command keeps alive the docker container
tail -F \
"$ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/servers/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME/logs/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME.log" \
"$ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/servers/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME/logs/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME.nohup" \
"$ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/servers/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME/logs/$ADMIN_SERVER_NAME.out"
This is a complete startup script that you can use as an example and improve it. It starts the node manager and the admin server: https://github.com/zappee/docker-images/blob/master/oracle-weblogic/oracle-weblogic-12.2.1.4-admin-server/container-scripts/startup.sh
From here you can download the complete working solution.

Run command in Docker Container only on the first start

I have a Docker Image which uses a Script (/bin/bash /init.sh) as Entrypoint. I would like to execute this script only on the first start of a container. It should be omitted when the containers is restarted or started again after a crash of the docker daemon.
Is there any way to do this with docker itself, or do if have to implement some kind of check in the script?
I had the same issue, here a simple procedure (i.e. workaround) to solve it:
Step 1:
Create a "myStartupScript.sh" script that contains this code:
CONTAINER_ALREADY_STARTED="CONTAINER_ALREADY_STARTED_PLACEHOLDER"
if [ ! -e $CONTAINER_ALREADY_STARTED ]; then
touch $CONTAINER_ALREADY_STARTED
echo "-- First container startup --"
# YOUR_JUST_ONCE_LOGIC_HERE
else
echo "-- Not first container startup --"
fi
Step 2:
Replace the line "# YOUR_JUST_ONCE_LOGIC_HERE" with the code you want to be executed only the first time the container is started
Step 3:
Set the scritpt as entrypoint of your Dockerfile:
ENTRYPOINT ["/myStartupScript.sh"]
In summary, the logic is quite simple, it checks if a specific file is present in the filesystem; if not, it creates it and executes your just-once code. The next time you start your container the file is in the filesystem so the code is not executed.
The entry point for a docker container tells the docker daemon what to run when you want to "run" that specific container. Let's ask the questions "what the container should run when it's started the second time?" or "what the container should run after being rebooted?"
Probably, what you are doing is following the same approach you do with "old-school" provisioning mechanisms. Your script is "installing" the needed scripts and you will run your app as a systemd/upstart service, right? If you are doing that, you should change that into a more "dockerized" definition.
The entry point for that container should be a script that actually launches your app instead of setting things up. Let's say that you need java installed to be able to run your app. So in the dockerfile you set up the base container to install all the things you need like:
FROM alpine:edge
RUN apk --update upgrade && apk add openjdk8-jre-base
RUN mkdir -p /opt/your_app/ && adduser -HD userapp
ADD target/your_app.jar /opt/your_app/your-app.jar
ADD scripts/init.sh /opt/your_app/init.sh
USER userapp
EXPOSE 8081
CMD ["/bin/bash", "/opt/your_app/init.sh"]
Our containers, at the company I work for, before running the actual app in the init.sh script they fetch the configs from consul (instead of providing a mount point and place the configs inside the host or embedded them into the container). So the script will look something like:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Downloading config from consul..."
confd -onetime -backend consul -node $CONSUL_URL -prefix /cfgs/$CONSUL_APP/$CONSUL_ENV_NAME
echo "Launching your-app..."
java -jar /opt/your_app/your-app.jar
One advice I can give you is (in my really short experience working with containers) treat your containers as if they were stateless once they are provisioned (all the commands you run before the entry point).
I had to do this and I ended up doing a docker run -d which just created a detached container and started bash (in the background) followed by a docker exec, that did the necessary initialization. here's an example
docker run -itd --name=myContainer myImage /bin/bash
docker exec -it myContainer /bin/bash -c /init.sh
Now when I restart my container I can just do
docker start myContainer
docker attach myContainer
This may not be ideal but work fine for me.
I wanted to do the same on windows container. It can be achieved using task scheduler on windows. Linux equivalent for task Scheduler is cron. You can use that in your case. To do this edit the dockerfile and add the following line at the end
WORKDIR /app
COPY myTask.ps1 .
RUN schtasks /Create /TN myTask /SC ONSTART /TR "c:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe C:\app\myTask.ps1" /ru SYSTEM
This Creates a task with name myTask runs it ONSTART and the task its self is to execute a powershell script placed at "c:\app\myTask.ps1".
This myTask.ps1 script will do whatever Initialization you need to do on the container startup. Make sure you delete this task once it is executed successfully or else it will run at every startup. To delete it you can use the following command at the end of myTask.ps1 script.
schtasks /Delete /TN myTask /F

initctl too old upstart check

I am trying to do a syntax check on an upstart script using init-checkconf. However when I run it, it returns ERROR: version of /sbin/initctl too old.
I have no idea what to do, I have tried reinstalling upstart but nothing changes. This is being run from within a docker container (ubuntu:14.04) which might have something to do with it.
I just ran into the same issue.
Looking in the container:
root#puppet-master:/# cat /sbin/initctl
#!/bin/sh
exit 0
I haven't tested it completly yet, but I added the following to my Dockerfile:
# Fix upstart
RUN rm -rf /sbin/initctl && ln -s /sbin/initctl.distrib /sbin/initctl
I thought this link explained it pretty good:
When your Docker container starts, only the CMD command is run. The only processes that will be running inside the container is the CMD command, and all processes that it spawns. That's why all kinds of important system services are not run automatically – you have to run them yourself.
Digging around some more, I found an official Ubuntu image containing a working version of upstart:
https://registry.hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu-upstart/

Docker multiple entrypoints

Say I have the following Dockerfile:
FROM ubuntu
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y apache2
RUN apt-get install -y mongod #pretend this exists
EXPOSE 80
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/sbin/apache2"]
The ENTRYPOINT command makes it so that apache2 starts when the container starts. I want to also be able to start mongod when the the container starts with the command service mongod start. According to the documentation however, there must be only one ENTRYPOINT in a Dockerfile. What would be the correct way to do this then?
As Jared Markell said, if you wan to launch several processes in a docker container, you have to use supervisor. You will have to configure supervisor to tell him to launch your different processes.
I wrote about this in this blog post, but you have a really nice article here detailing how and why using supervisor in Docker.
Basically, you will want to do something like:
FROM ubuntu
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y apache2
RUN apt-get install -y mongod #pretend this exists
RUN apt-get install -y supervisor # Installing supervisord
ADD supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf
EXPOSE 80
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]
And add a configuration a file supervisord.conf
[supervisord]
nodaemon=true
[program:mongodb]
command=/etc/mongod/mongo #To adapt, I don't know how to launch your mongodb process
[program:apache2]
command=/usr/sbin/apache2 -DFOREGROUND
EDIT: As this answer has received quite lot of upvotes, I want to precise as a warning that using Supervisor is not considered as a best practice to run several jobs. Instead, you may be interested in creating several containers for your different processes and managing them through docker compose.
In a nutshell, Docker Compose allows you to define in one file all the containers needed for your app and launch them in one single command.
My solution is to throw individual scripts into /opt/run/ and execute them with:
#!/bin/bash
LOG=/var/log/all
touch $LOG
for a in /opt/run/*
do
$a >> $LOG &
done
tail -f $LOG
And my entry point is just the location of this script, say it's called /opt/bin/run_all:
ADD 00_sshd /opt/run/
ADD 01_nginx /opt/run/
ADD run_all /opt/bin/
ENTRYPOINT ["/opt/bin/run_all"]
The simple answer is that you should not because it breaks the single responsibility principle: one container, one service. Imagine that you want to spawn additional cloud images of MongoDB because of a sudden workload - why increasing Apache2 instances as well and at a 1:1 ratio?
Instead, you should link the boxes and make them speak through TCP. See https://docs.docker.com/userguide/dockerlinks/ for more info.
Typically, you would not do this. It is an anti-pattern because:
You typically have different update cycles for the two processes
You may want to change base filesystems for each of these processes
You want logging and error handling for each of these processes that are independent of each other
Outside of a shared network or volume, the two processes likely have no other hard dependencies
Therefore the best option is to create two separate images, and start the two containers with a compose file that handles the shared private network.
If you cannot follow that best practice, then you end up in a scenario like the following. The parent image contains a line:
ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint-parent.sh"]
and you want to add the following to your child image:
ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint-child.sh"]
Then the value of ENTRYPOINT in the resulting image is replaced with /entrypoint-child.sh, in other words, there is only a single value for ENTRYPOINT. Docker will only call a single process to start your container, though that process can spawn child processes. There are a couple techniques to extend entrypoints.
Option A: Call your entrypoint, and then run the parent entrypoint at the end, e.g. /entrypoint-child.sh could look like:
#!/bin/sh
echo Running child entrypoint initialization steps here
/usr/bin/mongodb ... &
exec /entrypoint-parent.sh "$#"
The exec part is important, it replaces the current shell by the /entrypoint-parent.sh shell or process, which removes issues with signal handling. The result is you run the first bit of initialization in the child entrypoint, and then delegate to the original parent entrypoint. This does require that you keep track of the name of the parent entrypoint, would could change between versions of your base image. This also means you lose error handling and graceful termination on mongodb since it is run in the background. This could result in a false healthy container and data lose, neither of which I would recommend for a production environment.
Option B: Run the parent entrypoint in the background. This is less than ideal since you will no longer have error handling on the parent process unless you take some extra steps. At the simplest, this looks like the following in your /entrypoint-child.sh:
#!/bin/sh
# other initialization steps
/entrypoint-parent.sh "$#" &
# potentially wait for parent to be running by polling
# run something new in the foreground, that may depend on parent processes
exec /usr/bin/mongodb ...
Note, the "$#" notation I keep using is passing through the value of CMD as arguments to the parent entrypoint.
Option C: Switch to a tool like supervisord. I'm not a huge fan of this since it still implies running multiple daemons inside your container, and you are usually best to split that into multiple containers. You need to decide what the proper response is when a single child process keeps failing.
Option D: Similar to Options A and B, I often create a directory of entrypoint scripts that can be extended at different levels of the image build. The entrypoint itself is unchanged, I just add new files into a directory that gets called sequentially based on the filename. In my scenarios, these scripts are all run in the foreground, and I exec the CMD at the end. You can see an example of this in my base image repo, in particular the entrypoint.d directory and bin/entrypointd.sh script which includes the section:
# ...
for ep in /etc/entrypoint.d/*; do
ext="${ep##*.}"
if [ "${ext}" = "env" -a -f "${ep}" ]; then
# source files ending in ".env"
echo "Sourcing: ${ep}"
set -a && . "${ep}" && set +a
elif [ "${ext}" = "sh" -a -x "${ep}" ]; then
# run scripts ending in ".sh"
echo "Running: ${ep}"
"${ep}"
fi
done
# ...
# run command with exec to pass control
echo "Running CMD: $#"
exec "$#"
However, the above is more for extending the initialization steps, and not for running multiple daemons inside the container. Given the bad options and issues they each have, I hope it's clear why running two containers would be preferred in your scenario.
I was not able to get the usage of && to work. I was able to solve this as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19872810/2971199
So in your case you could do:
RUN echo "/usr/sbin/apache2" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
RUN echo "/path/to/mongodb" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/bash"]
You may need/want to edit your start commands.
Be careful if you run your Dockerfile more than once, you probably don't want multiple copies of commands appended to your bash.bashrc file. You could use grep and an if statement to make your RUN command idempotent.
You can't specify multiple entry points in a Dockerfile. To run multiple servers in the same docker container you must use a command that will be able to launch your servers. Supervisord has already been cited but I could also recommend multirun, a project of mine which is a lighter alternative.
There is an answer in docker docs:
https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/multi-service_container/
But in short
If you need to run more than one service within a container, you can accomplish this in a few different ways.
The first one is to run script which mange your process.
The second one is to use process manager like supervisord
I can think of several ways:
you can write a script to put on the container (ADD) that does all the startup commands, then put that in the ENTRYPOINT
I think you can put any shell commands on the ENTRYPOINT, so you can do service mongod start && /usr/sbin/apache2
If you are trying to run multiple concurrent npm scripts such as a watch script and a build script for example, check out:
How can I run multiple npm scripts in parallel?

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