Vocker

An experimental plugin that introduces Docker to Vagrant as a provisioner and as a command that allows you to interact with the guest machine Docker installation. It can also be used for building other Vagrant plugins that needs interaction with a Docker instance.

Installation

Make sure you have Vagrant 1.2+ and run:

vagrant plugin install vocker

Features

  • Automatically installs Docker on guest machines
  • Adds a command to interact with guest's Docker from the host machine
  • Allows you to provision VMs with Docker images / containers from within your Vagrantfile
  • Can be used to build other plugins (and I'm currently working on one :)

Status

Early development. It can be useful for trying out Docker and it's growing "ecossystem" but the feature set and configuration format might change rapidly.

Apart from that I've only used the plugin on the following Ubuntu 13.04 VMs:

Please note that in order to use the plugin on vagrant-lxc containers you need some extra steps described below

Usage

Currently Vocker can be used in three different ways: as a provisioner, as a command and as a foundation for other Vagrant plugins.

Provisioner

On the same spirit as the undocumented CFEngine provisioner, this plugin will automatically install Docker on Guest machines if you specify the provisioner on your Vagrantfile like:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = 'your-box'
  config.vm.provision :docker
end

Please note that only Ubuntu / Debian guests are currently capable of automatic Docker installation. For usage on other guests you'll need to manually install it prior to use this plugin.

You can also use the provisioner block to specify images to be pulled and / or containers to run:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision :docker do |docker|
    docker.pull_images 'ubuntu', 'busybox'

    # Command + image
    docker.run 'echo ls -la --color', 'ubuntu'

    # Unique container name + other configs
    docker.run 'date', image: 'ubuntu', cmd: '/bin/sh -c "while true; date; do echo hello world; sleep 1; done"'

    # Base image (requires ENTRYPOINT / CMD) to be configured:
    #   * http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/use/builder/#entrypoint
    #   * http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/use/builder/#cmd
    docker.run 'mysql'
  end
end

The provisioner will also ensure that a single instance of the container is running at a time and you can run vagrant provision as many times as you want without leaving lots of unused containers behind. If you are interested on understanding how it works, have a look at DockerClient#run

vagrant docker command

The command is basically a wrapper over vagrant ssh -c that allows you to run docker commands on the guest VM:

Usage: vagrant docker [vm-name] COMMAND [ARGS]

COMMAND can be any of attach, build, commit, diff, events, export, history,
images, import, info, insert, inspect, kill, login, logs, port, top, ps,
pull, push, restart, rm, rmi, run, search, start, stop, tag, version, wait

    -h, --help                       Print this help

your-awesome-vagrant-plugin™

In case you want to build a Vagrant plugin that needs to interact with Docker you can add this plugin as a dependency and use DockerClient / DockerInstaller classes. An example of usage will be provided "soon".

Usage with vagrant-lxc

If you are on a Linux machine, you can use vagrant-lxc to avoid messing up with your working environment. While developing this plugin I was able to recreate containers that were capable of using Docker without issues multiple times on an up to date Ubuntu 13.04 host and guest.

In order to allow a vagrant-lxc container to boot nested Docker containers you'll just need to apt-get install apparmor-utils && aa-complain /usr/bin/lxc-start and add the code below to your Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    lxc.customize 'aa_profile', 'unconfined'
  end

  config.vm.provision :shell, inline: %[
    if ! [ -f /etc/default/lxc ]; then
      cat <<STR > /etc/default/lxc
LXC_AUTO="true"
USE_LXC_BRIDGE="true"
LXC_BRIDGE="lxcbr0"
LXC_ADDR="10.0.253.1"
LXC_NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
LXC_NETWORK="10.0.253.0/24"
LXC_DHCP_RANGE="10.0.253.2,10.0.253.254"
LXC_DHCP_MAX="253"
LXC_SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT=120
STR
    fi
  ]
end

The LXC networking configs are only required if you are on an Ubuntu host as it automatically creates the lxcbr0 bridge for you on the host machine and if you don't do that the vagrant-lxc container will end up crashing as it will collide with the host's lxcbr0.

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request