Docker cheatsheet

Simple Docker cheatsheet. This is a short introduction about Docker usage and common questions I have been asking myself about Docker.

The official documentation for building docker images can be found here

Build an image

Building an image is really easy. As a requirement, you need to be in a directory that can contain data you will use for building the image but most importantly, you need a Dockerfile file.

The Dockerfile file hold all the instructions to create the container. A simple example would be this description:

FROM busybox
CMD "echo" "hello world"

This will create a docker container using busybox base image and run echo "hello world" when you run it.

To create the container, use the following command in the same directory in which Dockerfile is:

$ docker build -t your-image-name .

Advanced image building

If you need to compile sources to distribute a working binary, you need to prepare the environment to have the required dependencies to compile and then you need to compile a static binary to ship the container without all the dependencies.

In the following example we will use a debian environment to build the software downloaded by git.

FROM debian as work
WORKDIR /project

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y git make gcc
RUN git clone git://bitreich.org/sacc /project
RUN apt-get install -y libncurses5-dev libncurses5
RUN make LDFLAGS="-static -lncurses -ltinfo"

FROM debian

COPY --from=work /project/sacc /usr/local/bin/sacc

CMD "sacc" "gopherproject.org"

I won’t explain every command here, but you may see that I have split the packages installation in two commands. This was to help debugging.

The trick here is that the docker build process has a cache feature. Every time you use a FROM, COPY, RUN or CMD docker will cache the current state of the build process, if you re-run the process docker will be able to pick up the most recent state until the change.

I wasn’t sure how to compile statically the software at first, and having to install git make and gcc and run git clone EVERY TIME was very time consuming and bandwidth consuming.

In case you run this build and it fails, you can re-run the build and docker will catch up directly at the last working step.

If you change a line, docker will reuse the last state with a FROM/COPY/RUN/CMD command before the changed line. Knowing about this is really important for more efficient cache use.

Run an image

With the previously locally built image we can run it with the command:

$ docker run your-image-name
hello world

By default, when you use an image name to run, if you don’t have a local image that match the name docker will check on the docker official repository if an image exists, if so, it will be pulled and run.

$ docker run hello-world

This is a sample official container that will display some explanations about docker.

If you want to try a gopher client, I made a docker version of it that you can run with the following command:

$ docker run -t -i rapennesolene/sacc

Why did you require -t and -i parameters? The former is to tell docker you want a tty because it will manipulate a terminal and the latter is to ask an interactive session.

Persistant data

By default, every data of the docker container get wiped out once it stops, which may be really undesirable if you use docker to deploy a service that has a state and require an installation, configuration files etc…

Docker has two ways to solve it:

1) map a local directory 2) map a docker volume name

This is done with the parameter -v with the docker run command.

$ docker run -v data:/var/www/html/ nextcloud

This will map a persistent storage named “data” on the host on the path /var/www/html in the docker instance. By using data, docker will check if /var/lib/docker/volumes/data exists, if so it will reuse it and if not it will create it.

This is a convenient way to name volumes and let docker manage it.

The other way is to map a local path to a container environment path.

$ docker run -v /home/nextcloud:/var/www/html nextcloud

In this case, the directory /home/nextcloud on the host and /var/www/html in the docker environment will be the same directory.