Run In a Container

What

This small app allows you to easily build and run apps inside docker containers.

Adding just a Dockerfile and an entrypoint script you are able to ease the use of (for instance) X11 apps without the need of remembering or manually typing each time all the needed parameters.

How to use?

$ git clone https://github.com/ivanalejandro0/run-in-container.git
$ cd run-in-container
$ ./ric build atom  # https://atom.io/, the code editor
# [...vanilla docker build output...]
$ ./ric run atom  # that's it :)

$ xhost local:  # maybe needed

Adding more apps

In order to have more apps available you need to add a app-name folder to the apps/ directory, containing:

• Dockerfile starting from here we build the image with all the needed stuff for your application/service. This is optional, if no local image is found for this app it will be pulled from the docker registry.
• app.cfg in this file each app specifies some details about how to run it. This is useful to easily define apps without knowing much of docker itself.
• app.sh if this file exists, it will serve as a start point to run your app. This is useful if you need some special flags that are not available for the app.cfg file.

With just that your app can be managed with ric.

You can find templates for this on docs/app-template/.

Take a look at the existing ones on apps/.

For inspiration and examples take a look at Jess Frazelle's dockerfiles.

Data storage

All the applications will/should store their data on ./data/app-name/. This is configured on the app's entrypoint.

Some notes

This is useful for sandboxing but is as safe as a vanilla docker, so don't think this is bulletproof.

This started as a simple prototype to help me test new apps and maybe some superquick not-so-safe sandboxing.

There is a lot of room for improvements (I'll write down some of them as issues).

Feel free to open issues or send pull requests if you feel so.

Thanks to

Thanks to this guys for ideas, inspiration and some Dockerfiles that I've used here and there.

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/

https://github.com/jfrazelle/dockerfiles

http://subuser.org/

A long TODO list

There are lots of things that could be improved, I may or may not spend much more time on this.

First of all, I should move this list to Github issues.

Stop apps running on containers started in background.

Add dependency between apps. See relies_on from https://github.com/jfrazelle/dotfiles/blob/master/.dockerfunc#L20

Use Xpra (screen for X) + Xephyr (lighter X server). xvfb? (dummy x server) https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/docker-desktop-your-desktop-over-ssh-running-inside-of-a-docker-container/ https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xpra

Server: $ apt-get install openssh-server lxterminal $ xpra start --no-pulseaudio --no-mdns --encoding=rgb :10 $ DISPLAY=:10 lxterminal

Client: $ xpra attach ssh:root@172.17.0.34:10

Build apps using alpine when possible