Backup docker volume on a broken system. Volume recovery - docker

I have a server that's been running in docker on coreos. For some reason containerd has stopped running and the docker daemon has stopped working correctly. My efforts to debug haven't gotten far. I'd like to just boot a new instance and migrate, but I'm not sure I can backup my volume without a working docker service. Is it possible to backup my volume without using docker?
Most search results assume a running docker system, and don't work in this case.

By default, docker volumes are stored in /var/lib/docker/volumes. Being that you don't have a working docker setup, you might have to dive into the subfolders to figure out which volume you're concerned with, but that should at least give you a start. If it's helpful, in a working docker environment, you can inspect docker volumes outlined here, and get all necessary information you would need to carry this out.

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Update Docker Images via dockerized Jenkins Job

I run some docker containers on my Synology NAS. Now I also run Jenkins via Docker on the NAS and want to create a job that does the following steps:
Stop all Docker Containers
Delete all unnecessary stuff (-> docker system prune)
Rebuild all Docker images
Run the new Docker image
But I don't know how to access the host system in dockerized Jenkin. SSH to the Host doesn't seem to be a good idea.
Do you have any tips?
The whole point of your Docker images is to run in an isolated sandbox, so it's by design that your image doesn't have access to the native system. SSH is one approach, but risky, as you point out.
A better approach is to set the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to point to the IP of the NAS (which might need to be the virtual network NAS address). You will probably need to experiment a bit with getting the correct address and making sure the hosted docker command has permissions to drive the host's Docker service.
This post in the Synology Forums may get you on the right track.

Backup docker windows RUNNING container

I run some Docker Windows containers. I'm searching for some way to backup these containers, while they're running. But when I try to use standart ways to backup containers, I get such errors:
PS C:\Users\roza> docker commit 908d6334d554
Error response from daemon: windows does not support commit of a running container
PS C:\Users\roza> docker export 908d6334d554 -o tar.tar
Error response from daemon: the daemon on this platform does not support export of a container
Why I cannot commit/export running Windows containers?
Is there some (maybe non-standart and very tricky, maybe with usage of external tools) way to create backup of such containers?
This may not be what you want to hear but...
In container world, backup of running containers should not be required. If you lose something when the container exists, then the image should be better segmented. Anything that must survive after the container is killed (log, assets, or even temp folders) should be mapped as volumes. That will give you greater control over backup.
A commit of a Windows container also involves stopping it first, then committing. Another limitation is that VSS based apps won't interoperate with containers. As the earlier answer suggested, the standard approach for containers is to simply spin up a new container from an image.
Windows images from Microsoft (which is all Windows images) are licensed, and I believe part of that licensing means you cannot export the image. The lack of pause/unpause is because of the underlying implementation. Linux does a pause with cgroups which aren't on Windows. Only Windows HyperV containers support pause because they use a HyperV command to implement it.
That said, backing up anything in docker involves backing up 3 things:
the image registry server
the configuration for the container, preferably a docker-compose.yml file
the volume data
You don't backup the containers themselves, they are ephemeral, treated like cattle. The volume data will be a filesystem directory, and you'll use your standard backup tools on this directory. If you cannot backup while your container is running, then stop the container first, and restart the container after the backup is complete.

Deploying changes to Docker and its containers on the fly

Brand spanking new to Docker here. I have Docker running on a remote VM and am running a single dummy container on it (I can verify the container is running by issuing a docker ps command).
I'd like to secure my Docker installation by giving the docker user non-root access:
sudo usermod -aG docker myuser
But I'm afraid to muck around with Docker while any containers are running in case "hot deploys" create problems. So this has me wondering, in general: if I want to do any sort of operational work on Docker (daemon, I presume) while there are live containers running on it, what do I have to do? Do all containers need to be stopped/halted first? Or will Docker keep on ticking and apply the updates when appropriate?
Same goes for the containers themselves. Say I have a myapp-1.0.4 container deployed to a Docker daemon. Now I want to deploy myapp-1.0.5, how does this work? Do I stop 1.0.4, remove it from Docker, and then deploy/run 1.0.5? Or does Docker handle this for me under the hood?
if I want to do any sort of operational work on Docker (daemon, I presume) while there are live containers running on it, what do I have to do? Do all containers need to be stopped/halted first? Or will Docker keep on ticking and apply the updates when appropriate?
Usually, all containers are stopped first.
That happen typically when I upgrade docker itself: I find all my container stopped (except the data containers, which are just created, and remain so)
Say I have a myapp-1.0.4 container deployed to a Docker daemon. Now I want to deploy myapp-1.0.5, how does this work? Do I stop 1.0.4, remove it from Docker, and then deploy/run 1.0.5? Or does Docker handle this for me under the hood?
That depend on the nature and requirements of your app: for a completely stateless app, you could even run 1.0.5 (with different host ports mapped to your app exposed port), test it a bit, and stop 1.0.4 when you think 1.0.5 is ready.
But for an app with any kind of shared state or resource (mounted volumes, shared data container, ...), you would need to stop and rm 1.0.4 before starting the new container from 1.0.5 image.
(1) why don't you stop them [the data containers] when upgrading Docker?
Because... they were never started in the first place.
In the lifecycle of a container, you can create, then start, then run a container. But a data container, by definition, has no process to run: it just exposes VOLUME(S), for other container to mount (--volumes-from)
(2) What's the difference between a data/volume container, and a Docker container running, say a full bore MySQL server?
The difference is, again, that a data container doesn't run any process, so it doesn't exit when said process stops. That never happens, since there is no process to run.
The MySQL server container would be running as long as the server process doesn't stop.

Docker Container management in production environment

Maybe I missed something in the Docker documentation, but I'm curious and can't find an answer:
What mechanism is used to restart docker containers if they should error/close/etc?
Also, if many functions have to be done via a docker run command, say for instance volume mounting or linking, how does one bring up an entire hive of containers which complete an application without using docker compose? (as they say it is not production ready)
What mechanism is used to restart docker containers if they should error/close/etc?
Docker restart policies, as set with the --restart option to docker run. From the docker-run(1) man page:
--restart=""
Restart policy to apply when a container exits (no, on-fail‐
ure[:max-retry], always)
Also, if many functions have to be done via a docker run command, say for instance volume mounting or linking, how does one bring up an entire hive of containers which complete an application without using docker compose?
Well, you can of course use docker-compose if that is the best match for your requirements, even if it is not labelled as "production ready".
You can investigate larger container management solutions like Kubernetes or even OpenStack (although I would not recommend the latter unless you are already familiar with OpenStack).
You could craft individual systemd unit files for each container.

Is it ok to run docker from inside docker?

I'm running Jenkins inside a Docker container. I wonder if it's ok for the Jenkins container to also be a Docker host? What I'm thinking about is to start a new docker container for each integration test build from inside Jenkins (to start databases, message brokers etc). The containers should thus be shutdown after the integration tests are completed. Is there a reason to avoid running docker containers from inside another docker container in this way?
Running Docker inside Docker (a.k.a. dind), while possible, should be avoided, if at all possible. (Source provided below.) Instead, you want to set up a way for your main container to produce and communicate with sibling containers.
Jérôme Petazzoni — the author of the feature that made it possible for Docker to run inside a Docker container — actually wrote a blog post saying not to do it. The use case he describes matches the OP's exact use case of a CI Docker container that needs to run jobs inside other Docker containers.
Petazzoni lists two reasons why dind is troublesome:
It does not cooperate well with Linux Security Modules (LSM).
It creates a mismatch in file systems that creates problems for the containers created inside parent containers.
From that blog post, he describes the following alternative,
[The] simplest way is to just expose the Docker socket to your CI container, by bind-mounting it with the -v flag.
Simply put, when you start your CI container (Jenkins or other), instead of hacking something together with Docker-in-Docker, start it with:
docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock ...
Now this container will have access to the Docker socket, and will therefore be able to start containers. Except that instead of starting "child" containers, it will start "sibling" containers.
I answered a similar question before on how to run a Docker container inside Docker.
To run docker inside docker is definitely possible. The main thing is that you run the outer container with extra privileges (starting with --privileged=true) and then install docker in that container.
Check this blog post for more info: Docker-in-Docker.
One potential use case for this is described in this entry. The blog describes how to build docker containers within a Jenkins docker container.
However, Docker inside Docker it is not the recommended approach to solve this type of problems. Instead, the recommended approach is to create "sibling" containers as described in this post
So, running Docker inside Docker was by many considered as a good type of solution for this type of problems. Now, the trend is to use "sibling" containers instead. See the answer by #predmijat on this page for more info.
It's OK to run Docker-in-Docker (DinD) and in fact Docker (the company) has an official DinD image for this.
The caveat however is that it requires a privileged container, which depending on your security needs may not be a viable alternative.
The alternative solution of running Docker using sibling containers (aka Docker-out-of-Docker or DooD) does not require a privileged container, but has a few drawbacks that stem from the fact that you are launching the container from within a context that is different from that one in which it's running (i.e., you launch the container from within a container, yet it's running at the host's level, not inside the container).
I wrote a blog describing the pros/cons of DinD vs DooD here.
Having said this, Nestybox (a startup I just founded) is working on a solution that runs true Docker-in-Docker securely (without using privileged containers). You can check it out at www.nestybox.com.
Yes, we can run docker in docker, we'll need to attach the unix socket /var/run/docker.sock on which the docker daemon listens by default as volume to the parent docker using -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock.
Sometimes, permissions issues may arise for docker daemon socket for which you can write sudo chmod 757 /var/run/docker.sock.
And also it would require to run the docker in privileged mode, so the commands would be:
sudo chmod 757 /var/run/docker.sock
docker run --privileged=true -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -it ...
I was trying my best to run containers within containers just like you for the past few days. Wasted many hours. So far most of the people advise me to do stuff like using the docker's DIND image which is not applicable for my case, as I need the main container to be Ubuntu OS, or to run some privilege command and map the daemon socket into container. (Which never ever works for me)
The solution I found was to use Nestybox on my Ubuntu 20.04 system and it works best. Its also extremely simple to execute, provided your local system is ubuntu (which they support best), as the container runtime are specifically deigned for such application. It also has the most flexible options. The free edition of Nestybox is perhaps the best method as of Nov 2022. Highly recommends you to try it without bothering all the tedious setup other people suggest. They have many pre-constructed solutions to address such specific needs with a simple command line.
The Nestybox provide special runtime environment for newly created docker container, they also provides some ubuntu/common OS images with docker and systemd in built.
Their goal is to make the main container function exactly the same as a virtual machine securely. You can literally ssh into your ubuntu main container as well without the ability to access anything in the main machine. From your main container you may create all kinds of containers like a normal local system does. That systemd is very important for you to setup docker conveniently inside the container.
One simple common command to execute sysbox:
dock run --runtime=sysbox-runc -it any_image
If you think thats what you are looking for, you can find out more at their github:
https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox
Quicklink to instruction on how to deploy a simple sysbox runtime environment container: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox/blob/master/docs/quickstart/README.md

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