When people talk about the 'Docker Engine' do they mean both the Client and the Daemon? Or is it something else entirely?
As I see it there is a Docker Client, a Docker Daemon. The Client runs locally and connects to the Daemon which does the actual running of the containers. The Client can connect to a remote Daemon. Are these both together the Engine? thanks
The Docker Engine is the Docker Daemon running on a single host, installed with the Docker Client CLI. Here are the docs that answer this specific question.
On top of that, you can have a Swarm running that joins multiple hosts to horizontally scale and provide fault tolerance. And there are numerous other projects from Docker, like their Registry, Docker Cloud, and Universal Control Plane, that are each separate from the engine.
Docker engine is a client-server application which comprises of 3 components.
1. Client: Docker CLI or the command line window that helps us to interact.
2. REST API: Client communicate with the server with REST API, the commands issued by the client is sent to the server in the form of REST API, it is this reason our server can either be in the local or remote machine.
3. Server: Server here is either the local or remote machine or host machine which has a daemon process running in it which receives the commands and creates, manages and destroys the docker objects like images, containers, volumes etc.
Related
I am new to the containers topic and would appreciate if this forum is the right place to ask this question.
I am learning dockers and containers and I now have some skills using the docker commands and dealing with containers. I understand that docker has two main parts, the docket client (docker.exe) and the docker server (dockerd.exe). Now in the development life both are installed on my local machine (I am manually installed them on windows server 2016) followed Nigel Poulton tutorial here https://app.pluralsight.com/course-player?clipId=f1f27565-e2bf-4e58-96f3-bc2c3b160ec9. Now when it comes to the real production life, then, how would I configure my docker client to communicate with a remote docker server. I tried to make some research on the internet but honestly could not find a simple answer for this question. I installed docker for desktop on my windows 10 machine and noticed that it created a hyper-v machine which might be Linux machine, my understanding is that this machine has the docker server that my docker client interacts with but do not understand how is this interaction gets done.
I would appreciate if I get some guidance or clear answer to my inquiries.
In production environments you never have a remote Docker daemon. Generally you interact with Docker either through a dedicated orchestrator (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Nomad, AWS ECS), or through a general-purpose system automation tool (Chef, Ansible, Salt Stack), or if you must by directly ssh'ing to the system and running docker commands there.
Remote access to the Docker daemon is something of a security disaster. If you can access the Docker daemon at all, you can edit any file on the host system as root, and pretty trivially take over the whole thing. (Google "Docker cryptojacking" for some real-world examples.) In principle you can secure it with mutual TLS, but this is a tricky setup.
The other important best practice is that Docker images should be self-contained. Don't try to deploy a Docker image to production, and also separately copy your application code. The same Ansible setup that can deploy a Docker container can also install Node directly on the target system, avoiding a layer; it's tricky to copy application code into a Kubernetes volume, especially when Kubernetes pods can restart outside your direct control. Deploy (and test!) your images with all of the code COPYd in a Dockerfile, minimizing the use of bind mounts.
I use docker-compose to spin up a few containers as part of an application I'm developing. One of the containers needs to start a docker swarm service on the host machine. On Docker for Windows and Docker for Mac, I can connect to the host docker daemon using the REST Api by using the "host.docker.internal" DNS name and this works great. However, if I run the same compose file on linux, "host.docker.internal" does not work (yet, seems it may be coming in the next version of docker). To make matters worse, on Linux I can use network mode of "host" to work around the issue but that isn't supported on Windows or Mac.
How can I either:
Create a docker-compose file or structure a containerized application to be slightly different based on the host platform (windows|mac|linux) without having to create multiple docker-compose.yml files or different application code?
Access the host docker daemon in a consistent way regardless of the host OS?
If it matters, the container that is accessing the docker daemon of the host is using the docker python sdk and making api calls to docker over tcp without TLS (this is used for development only).
Update w/ Solution Detail
For a little more background, there's a web application (aspnet core/C#) that allows users to upload a zip file. The zip file contains, among other things, an exported docker image file. There's also an nginx container in front of all of this to allow for ssl termination and load balancing. The web application pulls out the docker image, then using the docker daemon's http api, loads the image, re-tags the image, then pushes it to a private docker repository (which is running somewhere on the developer's network, external to docker). After that, it posts a message to a message queue where a separate python application uses the python docker library to deploy the docker image to a docker swarm.
For development purposes, the applications all run as containers and thus need to interact with docker running on the host machine as a stand alone swarm node. SoftwareEngineer's answer lead me down the right path. I mapped the docker socket from the host into the web application container at first but ran into a limitation of .net core that won't be resolved until .net 5 which is that there's no clean way of doing http over a unix socket.
I worked around that issue by eventually realizing that nginx can reverse proxy http traffic to a unix socket. I setup all containers (including the dynamically loaded swarm service from the zips) to be part of an overlay network to give them all access to each other and allowing me to hit an http endpoint to control the host machine's docker/swarm daemon over http.
The last hurdle I ran into was that nginx couldn't write to the mapped in /var/run/docker.sock file so I modified nginx.conf to allow it to run as root within the container.
As far as I can tell, the docker socket is available at the path /var/run/docker.sock on all systems. I have personally verified this with a recent Linux distro (Ubuntu), Windows 10 Pro running Docker for Windows (2.2.0) with both WSL2 (Ubuntu and Alpine) and the windows cmd (cli) and powershell. From memory, it works with OSX too, and I used to do the same thing in WSL1.
Mapping this into a container is achieved on any terminal with the -v, --volume, or --mount flags. So,
docker container run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
Mounts the socket into an identical path within the container. This means that you can access the socket using the standard docker client (docker) from within the container with no extra configuration. Using this path inside a Linux container is recommended because the standard location and is likely to be less confusing to anyone maintaining your code in the future (including yourself).
I am a newbie to docker. When I go through docker tutorial, I saw that "Docker client can communicate with more than one daemon". What does that mean exactly?
By default, the Docker daemon listens on a Unix socket, /var/run/docker.sock. However, Docker can also be configured to listen on a TCP socket. In fact, it is often configured this way on Mac and Windows systems because Docker is actually running inside a virtual machine and the default Docker socket is not available on the host filesystem.
Because there are different ways of connecting to Docker, you must be able to configure the Docker client to connect to a Docker daemon at a specific location. You can do this using the DOCKER_HOST environment variable. You can point this at a network location:
export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.99.101:2376
Or at an alternate socket location:
export DOCKER_HOST=unix:///tmp/docker.sock
If you have Docker configured to listen for tcp connections, you can use the Docker client on a single machine to communicate with Docker on multiple hosts (but if you decide to do something like this, read through "Protect the Docker daemon socket").
Per the Docker Documentation,
The Docker client can communicate with more than one daemon.
This means that the command-line utility docker can connect to different services that run in the background,
Docker uses a client-server architecture. The Docker client talks to the Docker daemon, which does the heavy lifting of building, running, and distributing your Docker containers.
So for example, you could configure the daemon to run on a separate machine and connect to it from your workstation.
Now I have two laptops (not necessary in one local network) and docker installed on both of them. My goal is to run docker daemon on the first laptop and be able to execute commands using docker client on the second laptop. What should I do to achieve the goal?
Follow the public API? Docker Engine API
Setup Docker to listen for TCP connections on a specified port and protect that port with TLS. You must setup some environment variables so the Docker client communicates with the Docker daemon.
Here's the relevant documentation:
https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/
https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/https/
Enjoy, and have fun.
Looking at Rancher, what is the performance like? I guess my main question, is everything deployed in Rancher docker in docker? After reading http://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker-in-docker-for-ci/ I trying to stay away from that idea. It looks like the Rancher CI pipeline with Docker/Jenkins is docker in docker, but what about the rest? If i setup a docker-compose or deploy something from their catalog, is it all docker in docker? I've read through their documentation and this simple question has still just flown over my head. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
Thank you
Rancher itself is not deployed with Docker in Docker (DinD). The main components of Rancher, rancher/server and rancher/agent are both normal containers. The server, in a normal deployment, runs the orchestration piece and a few other key services for the catalog, Docker Machine provisioning, websocket-proxy and MySQL. All of these can be broken out if desired, but for simplicity of getting started, its all in one. We use s6 to manage the orchestration and database processes.
The rancher/agent container is privileged and requires the user to bind mount the hosts Docker socket. We package a Docker binary in the container and use it to communicate with the host on startup. It is similar to the way a Mac talks to Boot2docker, the binary is just a client talking to a remote Docker daemon. Once the agent is bootstrapped, it communicates back to the Rancher server container over a websocket connection. When containers and stacks are deployed Rancher server sends events to the agents which then call the hosts Docker daemon for deployment. The deployed containers are running as normal Docker containers on the host, just as if the user typed docker run .... In fact, a neat feature of Rancher is that if you do type docker run ... on the host, the resulting container will show up in the Rancher UI.
The Jenkins entry in the Rancher catalog, when using the Swarm plugin is doing a host bind mount of the Docker socket as well. We have some early experiments that used DinD to test out some concepts with Jenkins, but those were not released.