Docker: where should I put container configuration and war file - docker

Recently I was trying to figure out how a docker workflow looks like.
What I thought is, devs should push images locally and in other environments servers should just directly pull that image and run it.
But I could see a lot of public images allows people to put configurations outside the container.
For example, in official elasticsearch image, there is a command as follows:
docker run -d -v "$PWD/config":/usr/share/elasticsearch/config elasticsearch
So what is the point of putting configuration outside the container instead of running local containers quickly?
My argument is
if I put configuration inside a custom image, in testing environment or production, the server just need to pull that same image which is already built.
if I put configuration outside the image, in other environments, there will be another process to get that configuration from somewhere. Sure we could use git to source control that, but is this a tedious and useless effort to manage it? And installing third party libraries is also required.
Further question:
Should I put the application file (for example, war file) inside web server container or outside it?

When you are doing development, configuration files may change often; so rather than keep rebuilding the containers, you may use a volume instead.
If you are in production and need dozens or hundreds of the same container, all with slightly different configuration files, it is easy to have one single image and have diverse configuration files living outside (e.g. use consul, etcd, zookeeper, ... or VOLUME).

Related

Should I use the application code inside the docker images or in volumes?

I am working on a Devops project. I want to find the perfect solution.
I have a conflict between two solutions. should I use the application code inside the docker images or in volumes?
Your code should almost never be in volumes, developer-only setups aside (and even then). This is doubly true if you have a setup like a frequent developer-only Node setup that puts the node_modules directory into a Docker-managed anonymous volume: since Docker will refuse to update that directory on its own, the primary effect of this is to cause Docker to ignore any changes to the package.json file.
More generally, in this context, you should think of the image as a way to distribute the application code. Consider clustered environments like Kubernetes: the cluster manager knows how to pull versioned Docker images on its own, but you need to work around a lot of the standard machinery to try to push code into a volume. You should not need to both distribute a Docker image and also separately distribute the code in the image.
I'd suggest using host-directory mounts for injecting configuration files and for storing file-based logs (if the container can't be configured to log to stdout). Use either host-directory or named-volume mounts for stateful containers' data (host directories are easier to back up, named volumes are faster on non-Linux platforms). Do not use volumes at all for your application code or libraries.
(Consider that, if you're just overwriting all of the application code with volume mounts, you may as well just use the base node image and not build a custom image; and if you're doing that, you may as well use your automation system (Salt Stack, Ansible, Chef, etc.) to just install Node and ignore Docker entirely.)

Sharing bind volume in Docker swarm

We use open-jdk image to deploy our jars. since we have multiple jars we simply attach them using bind mode and run them. I don't want to build separate images since our deployment will be in air gaped environments and each time I can't rebuild images as only the jars will be changing.
Now we are trying to move towards swarm. Since it is a bind mount, I'm unable to spread the replicas to other nodes.
If I use volumes how can I put these jars into that volume? One possibility is that I can run a dummy alpine image and mount the volume to host and then I can share it with other containers. But it possible to share that volume between the nodes? and is it an optimum solution? Also if I need to update the jars how can that be done?
I can create NFS drive but I'm trying to figure out a way of implementing without it. Since it is an isolated environment and may contain crucial data I can't use 3rd party plugins to finish the job as well.
So how docker swarm can be implemented in this scenario?
Use docker build. Really.
An image is supposed to be a static copy of your application and its runtime, and not the associated data. The statement "only the jars changed" means "we rebuilt the application". While you can use bind mounts to inject an application into a runtime-only container, I don't feel like it's really a best practice, and that's doubly true in a language where there's already a significant compile-time step.
If you're in an air-gapped environment, you need to figure out how you're going to provide application updates (regardless of the deployment framework). The best solution, if you can manage it, is to set up a private Docker registry on the isolated network, docker save your images (with the tars embedded), then docker load, docker tag, and docker push them into the registry. Then you can use the registry-tagged image name everywhere and not need to worry about manually pushing the images and/or jar files across.
Otherwise you need to manually distribute the image tar and docker load it, or manually push your updated jars on to each of the target systems. An automation system like Ansible works well for this; I'm partial to Ansible because it doesn't require a central server.

Where are you supposed to store your docker config files?

I'm new to docker so I have a very simple question: Where do you put your config files?
Say you want to install mongodb. You install it but then you need to create/edit a file. I don't think they fit on github since they're used for deployment though it's not a bad place to store the files.
I was just wondering if docker had any support for storing such config files so you can add them as part of running an image.
Do you have to use swarms?
Typically you'll store the configuration files on the Docker host and then use volumes to bind mount your configuration files in the container. This allows you to separately manage the configuration file from the running containers. When you make a change to the configuration, you can just restart the container.
You can then use a configuration management tool like Salt, Puppet, or Chef to manage copying/storing the configuration file onto the Docker host. Things like passwords can be managed by the secrets capabilities of the tool. When set up this way, changing a configuration file just means you need to restart your container and not build a new image.
Yes, in most cases you definitely want to keep your Dockerfiles in version control. If your org (or you personally) use GitHub for this, that's fine, but stick them wherever your other repos are. One of the main ideas in DevOps is to treat infrastructure as code. In fact, one of the main benefits of something like a Dockerfile (or a chef cookbook, or a puppet file, etc) is that it is "used for deployment" but can also be version-controlled, meaningfully diffed, etc.

How do I finalize my Docker setup and how is it actually called?

I am pretty new to Docker. After reading specifically what I needed I figured out how to create a pretty nice Docker setup. I have created some setup where in I can start up multiple systems using one docker-compose.yml file.
I am currently using this for testing specific PHP code on different PHP and MySQL versions. The file structure looks something like this:
./mysql55/Dockerfile
./mysql56/Dockerfile
./mysql57/Dockerfile
./php53/Dockerfile
./php54/Dockerfile
./php56/Dockerfile
./php70/Dockerfile
./php71/Dockerfile
./php72/Dockerfile
./web (shared folder with test files available on all php machines)
./master_web (web interface to send test request to all possible versions using one call)
./docker-compose.yml
In the docker-compose file I setup different containers most refering to the local Dockerfiles, some refering to online image names. When I run docker-compose up all containers start as expected in the configured network configuration and I'm able to use it as desired.
I would first of all like to know how this setup is called. Is this called a "docker swarn" or is such setup called differently?
Secondly, I'd like to make one "compiled/combined" file (image, container, swarn, engine, machine) or however it is called) of this. That I can save without having to depend on external sources again. Of course the docker-compose.yml file will work as long as all the refered external sources are still available. But I'd like to pusblish my fully confired setup as is. How do I do that?
You can publish built images with Docker registry. You can setup your own or use third-party service.
After that, you need to prefix you image names with your registry IP/DNS in docker-compose.yml. This way, you can deploy it anywhere docker-compose is installed (and docker-compose itself can be run as docker container too), just need to copy your docker-compose.yml file there.
docker-machine is tool to deploy to multiple machines, as is docker swarm.

How should I create Dockerfile to run multiple services through docker-compose?

I'm new to Docker. I wanted to create a Dockerfile to start services like RabbitMQ, ftp server and elastic search. But I'm not able to think from where should I start ?
I have asked a similar question here : How should I create a Dockerfile to run more than one services in one instance?
There I got to know, to create different containers : one for rabbitmq, one for ftp server and other for elasticsearch and run them using docker-compose file. There you'll find my created Dockerfile code.
It will be great if someone can help me out with this thing. Thanks!
They are correct. Each container & by extension, each image should be responsible for one concern & that is typically mapped to a single process. So if you need to run more than one thing (or more than one process, generally speaking, not strictly) then you most probably require to build separate images. One of the easiest & recommended ways of creating an image is writing a Dockerfile. This is expected to be an extremely simple process and most of it will be a copy paste of the same commands you would have used to install that component.
One you write the Dockerfile's for each service, you must build them using docker build command, which will result in the images.
When you run an image you get what is known as a container. Think of it roughly like an iso file is the image & the actual vm or running machine is the container.
Now you can use docker-compose to orchestrate how these various containers so they can communicate (or be isolated from) with each other. A docker-compose.yml file is a plain text file in the yaml format that describes the relationship between the different components within the app. Apps can be made up of several services - like webserver, appserver, searchengine, database server, cache engine etc etc. Each of these is a service and runs as a container, but it is also not necessary to run everything as a container. Some can remain running in the traditional way, on VM's or on bare metal servers.
I'll check your other post and add if there is anything needed. But I hope this helps you get started at least.

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