How to run container in a remote docker host with Jenkins - docker

I have two servers:
Server A: Build server with Jenkins and Docker installed.
Server B: Production server with Docker installed.
I want to build a Docker image in Server A, and then run the corresponding container in Server B. The question is then:
What's the recommended way of running a container in Server B from Server A, once Jenkins is done with the docker build? Do I have to push the image to Docker hub to pull it in Server B, or can I somehow transfer the image directly?
I'm really not looking for specific Jenkins plugins or stuff, but rather, from a security and architecture standpoint, what's the best approach to accomplish this?
I've read a ton of posts and SO answers about this and have come to realize that there are plenty of ways to do it, but I'm still unsure what's the ultimate, most common way to do this. I've seen these alternatives:
Using docker-machine
Using Docker Restful Remote API
Using plain ssh root#server.b "docker run ..."
Using Docker Swarm (I'm super noob so I'm still unsure if this is even an option for my use case)
Edit:
I run Servers A and B in Digital Ocean.

Docker image can be saved to a regular tar archive:
docker image save -o <FILE> <IMAGE>
Docs here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/image_save/
Then scp this tar archive to another host, and run docker load to load the image:
docker image load -i <FILE>
Docs here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/image_load/
This save-scp-load method is rarely used. The common approach is to set up a private Docker registry behind your firewall. And push images to or pull from that private registry. This doc describes how to deploy a container registry. Or you can choose registry service provided by a third party, such as Gitlab's container registry.

When using Docker repositories, you only push/pull the layers which have been changed.
You can use Docker REST API. Jenkins HTTP Request plugin can be used to make HTTP requests. You can run Docker commands directly on a remote Docker host setting the DOCKER_HOST environment variable. To export an the environment variable to the current shell:
export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://your-remote-server.org:2375"
Please be aware of the security concerns when allowing TCP traffic. More info.
Another method is to use SSH Agent Plugin in Jenkins.

Related

Use cache docker image for gitlab-ci

I was wondering is it possible to use cached docker images in gitlab registry for gitlab-ci?
for example, I want to use node:16.3.0-alpine docker image, can I cache it in my gitlab registry and pull it from that and speed up my gitlab ci instead of pulling it from docker hub?
Yes, GitLab's dependency proxy features allow you to configure GitLab as a "pull through cache". This is also beneficial for working around rate limits of upstream sources like dockerhub.
It should be faster in most cases to use the dependency proxy, but not necessarily so. It's possible that dockerhub can be more performant than a small self-hosted server, for example. GitLab runners are also remote with respect to the registry and not necessarily any "closer" to the GitLab registry than any other registry over the internet. So, keep that in mind.
As a side note, the absolute fastest way to retrieve cached images is to self-host your GitLab runners and hold images directly on the host. That way, when jobs start, if the image already exists on the host, the job will start immediately because it does not need to pull the image (depending on your pull configuration). (that is, assuming you're using images in the image: declaration for your job)
I'm using a corporate Gitlab instance where for some reason the Dependency Proxy feature has been disabled. The other option you have is to create a new Docker image on your local machine, then push it into the Container Registry of your personal Gitlab project.
# First create a one-line Dockerfile containing "FROM node:16.3.0-alpine"
docker pull node:16.3.0-alpine
docker build . -t registry.example.com/group/project/image
docker login registry.example.com -u <username> -p <token>
docker push registry.example.com/group/project/image
where the image tag should be constructed based on the example given on your project's private Container Registry page.
Now in your CI job, you just change image: node:16.3.0-alpine to image: registry.example.com/group/project/image. You may have to run the docker login command (using a deploy token for credentials, see Settings -> Repository) in the before_script section -- I think maybe newer versions of Gitlab will have the runner authenticate to the private Container Registry using system credentials, but that could vary depending on how it's configured.

How can I docker commit azure container instance to azure container registry

We have ansible configured to deploy our various applications on IIS environment. I am trying to create a docker image of deployed applications so that I can just start up containers as we need for testing and otherwise.
I am planning to build on the Windows IIS image, start the container on azure, run our ansible to install everything on the server, then save the image on container.
I cannot find any documentation on how I can docker commit the container image into our private azure container registry.
Is it possible?
If you have an existing Docker registry in azure you should be able to use the az acr login --name myregistry command to authenticate to it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-registry/container-registry-get-started-docker-cli. Make sure you have a registry created for the container image you want to push up.
Next, you can run the container in azure and do all the installation you want. SSH or RDP into the instance in Azure that is running this container. Now run docker ps and find the container id for the correct container. Next, use docker commit <container id> myregistry.azurecr.io/samples/nginx.
Then, just docker push myregistry.azurecr.io/samples/nginx
Also not sure what your use case is, but starting a container in order to modify and commit it in that way seems like an atypical use case for Docker since the build isn't reproducible via the Dockerfile. Looks like there are ways to replace Dockerfiles using Ansible playbooks with something like ansible-containers https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-container/ so you might want to take a look at that(I've never used this tool).

Installing and Running docker in a Docker container running in Openshift

I am currently working on the following scenario
I am trying to setup a container in OpenShift that runs a Jenkins that is itsself able to run docker to make use of declarative pipelines where the build is running in it's own docker container. This basically makes it necessary to install and run docker inside this container.
I have been working on it on quite some time now. Checked dozens of posts and threads online but I have not been able to accomplish it. Basically I got so far
I can install docker in my container (from the baseimage openshift/jenkins-2-centos7:latest)
I can't get docker to run as this makes use of systemctl which
Now I read that systemctl is not working inside docker containers or at least highly unrecommended as it interferes with the PID 1 in the system. Without
systemctl start docker
that will leave me with docker beeing unable to connect with the daemon (as expected) and the error message
Can't connect to docker daemon. Is 'docker -d' running on this host?
So I tried to set up the daemon myself using
the follwoing in my Dockerfile
RUN usermod -aG docker $(whoami)
RUN dockerd -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock
which will also not work telling me that cgroups cannot be mounted. After some more research I found that this could be handled with the cgroupfs-mount script from
https://github.com/tianon/cgroupfs-mount/tree/master
But also here I got no luck leaving me with the following error
Error starting daemon: Error initializing network controller: error obtaining controller instance: failed to create NAT chain DOCKER: iptables failed: iptables -t nat -N DOCKER: iptables v1.4.21: can't initialize iptables table `nat': Permission denied (you must be root)
Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.
Now after hours I am out of ideas. Does anyone have an idea how to make docker work inside of OpenShift? Would be really greatful
I am trying to setup a container in OpenShift that runs a Jenkins that is itsself able to run docker to make use of declarative pipelines where the build is running in it's own docker container. This basically makes it necessary to install and run docker inside this container.
I don't think your conclusion here is the only possibility, and what I'll describe below is an easier approach to get what (I think) you want! :) If there are any other use cases that you have than these 3 I'll describe, let me know and I'll try to update to cover them:
Pipelines running in their own containers
Running additional containers from Pipelines
Building container images from Pipelines
Pipelines running in their own containers
For this case, there's the excellent Kubernetes plugin.
With this plugin, you add a Kubernetes/OpenShift cloud to the Jenkins global config. This can either be the one in which Jenkins is running (if you use the Jenkins image provided by OpenShift, this gets added by default at least), or an external cluster.
Inside that configuration, you can define PodTemplates (again, there are a couple of examples provided in the Jenkins image provided by OpenShift), or you can specify that in your pipeline directly also I think. When your pipeline requests a node/agent with a label that matches one of these (and there are no long-running agents that match), then a pod will be created from that template, and your pipeline execution will happen inside a container in that. Once it's no longer needed, it will be deprovisioned again.
Here are the pipeline steps exposed by this plugin: https://jenkins.io/doc/pipeline/steps/kubernetes/
Running additional containers from Pipelines
As part of your pipeline, you may want to run some tests, and those may expect to be able to interact with e.g. a database. You can create resources for that in your OpenShift project (e.g. a Deployment & expose it with a Service), and tear them down after. The openshift-client plugin is very useful here and has docs on how to interact with OpenShift.
Building container images from Pipelines
If your goal is to build container images from pipelines, remember that OpenShift also exposes this capability (depending on the security configuration) through Builds. Just like in the previous section, you can use the openshift-client plugin to create and trigger builds.
For more information on the Jenkins image that's maintained by OpenShift (and generally how to do useful things in Jenkins on OpenShift), there's this dedicated page in the OpenShift docs.
You have this article by #jpetazzo, from Docker team, about Docker In Docker (DinD):
article:
The primary purpose of Docker-in-Docker was to help with the development of Docker itself. Many people use it to run CI (e.g. with Jenkins), which seems fine at first, but they run into many “interesting” problems that can be avoided by bind-mounting the Docker socket into your Jenkins container instead.
DinD Repo:
This work is now obsolete, thanks to the combined efforts of some amazing people like #jfrazelle and #tianon, who also are black belts in the art of putting IKEA furniture together.
If you want to run Docker-in-Docker today, all you need to do is:
docker run --privileged -d docker:dind
So here is an article using another approach to build docker containers with Jenkins inside a docker container:
docker run -p 8080:8080 \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
--name jenkins \
jenkins/jenkins:lts
So you may want to adapt one of this solutions to your OpenShift scenario. I hope it solves your issue.
You'll need a privileged pod running jenkins wich mounts the openshift node docker socket. This is a bad idea as jenkins'll launch container outside kubernetes semantics and control.
Why do not use s2i service shipped with openshift ?
Regards.

How to "docker push" to dynamic insecure registries?

OS: Amazon Linux (hosted on AWS)
Docker version: 17.x
Tools: Ansible, Docker
Our developers use Ansible to be able to spin up individual AWS spot environments that get populated with docker images that get built on their local machines, pushed into a docker registry created on the AWS spot machine, then pulled down and run.
When the devs do this locally on their Macbooks, ansible will orchestrate building the code with sbt, spin up an AWS spot instance, run a docker registry, push the image into the docker registry, command the instance to pull down the image and run it, run a testsuite, etc.
To make things better and easier for non-devs to be able to run individual test environments, we put the ansible script behind Jenkins and use their username to let ansible create a domain name in Route53 that points to their temporary spot instance environment.
This all works great without the registry -- i.e. using JFrog Artifactory to have these dynamic envs just pull pre-built images. It lets QA team members spin up any version of the env they want. But now to allow it to build code and push, I need to have an insecure registry and that is where things fell apart...
Since any user can run this, the Route53 domain name is dynamic. That means I cannot just hardcode in daemon.json the --insecure-registry entry. I have tried to find a way to set a wildcard registry but it didnt seem to work for me. Also since this is a shared build server (the one that is running the ansible commands) so I dont want to keep adding entries and restarting docker because other things might be running.
So, to summarize the questions:
Is there a way to use a wildcard for the insecure-registry entry?
How can I get docker to recognize insecure-registry entry without restarting docker daemon?
So far I've found this solution to satisfy my needs, but not 100% happy yet. I'll work on it more. It doesn't handle the first case of a wildcard, but it does seem to work for the 2nd question about reloading without restart.
First problem is I was editing the wrong file. It doesn't respect /etc/sysconfig/docker nor does it respect $HOME/.docker/daemon.json. The only file that works on Amazon Linux for me is /etc/docker/daemon.json so I manually edited it and then tested a reload and verified with docker info. I'll work on this more to programmatically be able to insert entries as needed, but the manual test works:
sudo vim /etc/docker/daemon.json
sudo systemctl reload docker.service
docker info

Best practice using docker inside Jenkins?

Hi I'm learning how to use Jenkins integrated with Docker and I don't understand what should I do to communicate them.
I'm running Jenkins inside a Docker container and I want to build an image in a pipeline. So I need to execute some docker commands inside the Jenkins container.
So the thing here is where docker come from. I understand that we need to bind mount the docker host daemon (socket) to the Jenkins container but this container still needs the binaries to execute Docker.
I have seen some approaches to achieve this and I'm confused what should I do. I have seen:
bind mount the docker binary (/usr/local/bin/docker:/usr/bin/docker)
installing docker in the image
if I'm not wrong the blue ocean image comes with Docker pre-installed (I have not found any documentation of this)
Also I don't understand what Docker plugins for Jenkins can do for me.
Thanks!
Docker has a client server architecture. The server is the docker deamon and the client is basically the command line interface that allows you to execute docker ... from the command line.
Thus when running Jenkins inside Docker you will need access to connect to the deamon. This is acheieved by binding the /var/run/docker.sock into the container.
At this point you need something to communicate with the Deamon which is the server. You can either do that by providing access to docker binaries. This can be achived by either mounting the docker binaries, or installing the
client binaries inside the Jenkins container.
Alternatively, you can communicate with the deamon using the Docker Rest API without having the docker client binaries inside the Jenkins container. You can for instance build an image using the API.
Also I don't understand what Docker plugins for Jenkins can do for me
The Docker plugin for Jenkins isn't useful for the use case that you described. This plugin allows you to provision Jenkins slaves using Docker. You can for instance run a compilation inside a Docker container that gets automatically provisioned by Jenkins
It is not best practice to use Docker with Jenkins. It is also not a bad practice. The relationship between Jenkins and Docker is not determined in such a manner that having Docker is good or bad.
Jenkins is a Continuous Integration Server, which is a fancy way of saying "a service that builds stuff at various times, according to predefined rules"
If your end result is a docker image to be distributed, you have Jenkins call your docker build command, collect the output, and report on the success / failure of the docker build command.
If your end result is not a docker image, you have Jenkins call your non-docker build command, collect the output, and report on the success / failure of the non-docker build.
How you have the build launched depends on how you would build the product. Makefiles are launched with make, Apache Ant with ant, Apache Maven with mvn package, docker with docker build and so on. From Jenkin's perspective, it doesn't matter, provided you provide a complete set of rules to launch the build, collect the output, and report the success or failure.
Now, for the 'Docker plugin for Jenkins'. As #yamenk stated, Jenkins uses build slaves to perform the build. That plugin will launch the build slave within a Docker container. The thing built within that container may or may not be a docker image.
Finally, running Jenkins inside a docker container just means you need to bind your Docker-ized Jenkins to the external world, as #yamenk indicates, or you'll have trouble launching builds.
Bind mounting the docker binary into the jenkins image only works if the jenkins images is "close enough" - it has to contain the required shared libraries!
So when sing a standard jenkins/jenkins:2.150.1 within an ubuntu 18.04 this is not working unfortunately. (it looked so nice and slim ;)
So the the requirement is to build or find a docker image which contains a compatible docker client for the host docker service is.
Many people seem to install docker in their jenkins image....

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