I’d like to continue the previous entry on Docker a little further. Last time we talked about the installation process & a little more, so this time we’re going to talk about the next part of getting started with Docker – writing a Dockerfile.

Here’s what we talked about last time, and with one odd little exception (why did I promise to talk about load testing…) we’re going to cover all these things!

So, next steps, make the container persistent – it isn’t yet, and play around with Dockerfiles, and just do a little more spying on the produced container itself & probably try to do some babby’s frist load testing things in there & spy on the container as a process without the box & all its processes within!

First let’s take a look at the Docker process we created last time. Just like at your native command line, docker commands all resemble low-level Linux commands, so just like you’d use ps to look at the processes running at any given time on your machine, you can use docker ps to see all the Docker processes it is managing at any given time. If you followed along last time you’ll see some that have been exited but which you don’t have access to – each time you run the docker run -it bash you get a new process. But the old ones are still there! The all flag will show us these Exited boxes with a docker ps -a.

rachel $ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                      COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS                     PORTS               NAMES
b5de9583d7b3        fedora                     "bash"                   10 minutes ago      Exited (0) 3 seconds ago                       pedantic_morse
35192bfa05d4        images/cowsay-dockerfile   "/usr/games/cowsay *P"   2 hours ago         Exited (0) 2 hours ago                         gigantic_goldberg
a0e40d55125a        images/cowsayimage         "/usr/games/cowsay 'D"   3 hours ago         Exited (0) 3 hours ago                         jovial_mcnulty
d32381833772        debian                     "bash"                   3 hours ago         Exited (0) 3 hours ago                         cowsay

You’ll notice a few things, first that the names are a mix of adjective_noun, except one – the cowsay container example is from the excellent Using Docker where I’ve gained a lot of my recent Docker information. Their status is all Exited. Some of the container-specific commands are similar to the init.d service commands, like start, stop, and rm, so let’s start the desired container in that list up there. The container we’re going to start up is similar to the one we made before & is Fedora, though it is true that I only made it ~10m ago!

docker start pedantic_morse

So now the output of docker ps includes the container we just made. So how do we keep it? We commit it, just like with Git! Replace pedantic_morse with whatever name yours has been assigned beneath the NAMES column.

rachel $ docker commit pedantic_morse images/morse
sha256:b398fe28d7fd26a52e0947fc8eebb7614b8a8d6d19a5332359df167c9296c04f

So what we’ve done here is create an image from which we can create containers. images/morse is the image, pedantic_morse is the Docker process that we crafted it from. For every time we run the image images/morse, it creates a new Docker process, so at this point it’s still not persistent in ONE image, HOWEVER we can use this image to perform one-offs.

Clearly we’re not getting into the strength of Docker, yet. So now it’s time for a very basic Dockerfile. Just like Vagrantfile and Procfile & probably a few other similarly intended setup files, the D in Dockerfile is capitalized and there’s no extension to it, because remember – Linux doesn’t care about file extensions!

The main piece to know with Dockerfiles is that their syntax can be as minimal as you like, and personally I recommend making them non-complex – major structural pieces, and insert kickoff scripts or use some config management in the container itself for anything much more complicated. I reserve the right to change my mind on this later! And this is also more for next time to learn. But the way it looks, the RUN command will run any bash you put in it, but if you need anything more complex, the contents become a lot more murky, in my opinion. Simple is better than complex, but complex is better than complicated, so let’s do what we need to here.

For posterity and a simplistic example, here’s the first Dockerfile I ever wrote. (ed note: I trimmed this down because each line of a Dockerfile creates a new filesystem – try to truncate Dockerfile lines as much as possible)

FROM fedora:23
RUN /bin/bash
RUN echo "the dockerfile took!"

RUN dnf install -y wget tar man

MAINTAINER Rachel!

The output of this, which is a bit long to post, pulls down version 23 of Fedora, uses bash for the following commands, prints “the dockerfile took!” to stdout, and then installs those three packages. I’m unsure why some of those aren’t present in a base Fedora image, but it doesn’t appear to be related to what I’m working on in this blog post, so we’ll leave it be for now.

This is about ten times longer than I thought it would be, woohoo! I hope you learned something, please please let me know if I’ve missed the mark on anything, cheers!

Tune in next time and we’ll talk about a more complicated Dockerfile, and syncing it up to… something 🙂 come back and you’ll find out what!