Dockerfiles

This repository contains config files for building docker.io images. These files are intended as a starting point for creating your own customized images. The general intention is to make it easier to move away from centralized services like Facebook, Gmail et al. Docker allows you to (relatively) easily run services in isolated containers on cheap hosts. So far the repo contains docker files for:

• http://owncloud.org - online file storage / dropbox replacement + calendar + contacts + tasks etc
• http://roundcube.net - webmail client
• http://pump.io/ - federated social network

Feel free to raise a ticket if there's anything else you'd particularly like to see dockerized.

NB this is a work in progress, don't expect things to be complete, correct or sensible.

Installing Docker

See http://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/

Downloading the repo

git clone https://github.com/Joeboy/dockerfiles.git

Building an image

cd dockerfiles/roundcube (or whatever)

(Edit the files as necessary)

docker build -t roundcube .

Expect to wait maybe half an hour or so while the build completes.

Running your image

docker run -p 8000:80 -d roundcube

The -p argument means "redirect port 8000 on the host to port 80 in the container". The -d means "run detached", ie. as a daemon in the background.

You should now be able to access roundcube at http://localhost:8000/roundcube/

Is that it?

That's all you need to get a working docker image. To be actually useful, unfortunately there's some other stuff you'll need to do.

Persistent data

Docker's design is such that if you stop an image and run it again, your new container will lose any changes that happened during the previous run. That's potentially a big problem. To avoid that happening, make folders on your host for anything you don't want to lose between runs and tell docker to bind mount them when you run your images. For example, to persist owncloud's config and data directories, do something like:

mkdir -p /dockerdata/owncloud/config /dockerdata/owncloud/data
docker run -v /dockerdata/owncloud/config:/var/www/owncloud/config -v /dockerdata/owncloud/data:/var/www/owncloud/data -p 8001:80 -d owncloud

Configuration

The supplied configurations are minimal and inadequate. You should make sure you edit the supplied files to suit your needs before building your image. Pay particular attention to passwords / encryption keys.

Hosting your docker image

You probably want to build / run your image on a server rather than your local PC. Fortunately hosting requirements are not too onerous. You could either host it on a dedicated box or a cheap VPS. See http://www.lowendbox.com/ for deals on VPSes. You should be OK with any x64 host that supports Ubuntu 13.04, although I can't guarantee anything. You should easily be able to find something beefy enough to handle a few docker containers in the "few bucks a month" range.

See also:

• http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/06/running-docker-on-digital-ocean/
• http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/05/running-docker-on-rackspace-cloud/

Proxying from the host to the docker container

If you're running more than one containerized web app, you'll want to proxy requests to the host to the container. One fairly straightforward way of doing this is with nginx:

apt-get install nginx

You'll want to amend /etc/nginx/sites-available/default with something like this:

server {
    listen      80;
    location /roundcube/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
    }
}

That'll pass requests to the host on port 80 to port 8000, which is hopefully the port we're passing onto the roundcube container (see the -p flag to docker run above).

SSL

You should create an SSL certificate and ensure that your docker images are being served over SSL. You can create a self-signed certificate using openssl, although web browsers will present scary warnings when people visit your site. Unfortunately you'll need to pay for a certificate from a commercial Certificate Authority if that's not acceptable.

TODO: find a friendly link