chrooted.net

I wanted to reinstall my inactive KVM VPS for quite some time and I thought it would be great if I could get some support for lightweight “virtual” containers to ease my development workflow. At first, I had a couple problems:

• Ubuntu 12.04 (in fact, almost all recent 64 bits Ubuntu version) wasn’t properly installing (The installer hanged during hardware discovery)
• Docker was mostly Ubuntu only (well for easy install at least)
• I had some trouble setting up simple lxc on Debian (There’s some documented issues on templates)

So I was happy today when I saw the announcement of the new 0.7 version of Docker which adds Standard Linux Support.

Here’s how I easily got it working:

# We'll do this stuff as root...
sudo -i

# Install dependencies
apt-get install lxc bridge-utils

# Cgroup support
echo 'cgroup    /sys/fs/cgroup  cgroup  defaults    0   0' > /etc/fstab
mount -a

# IP forwarding
echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' > /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

# Download and install (in /usr/local/bin) docker
wget http://get.docker.io/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-latest.tgz
tar -xf docker-latest.tgz -C /

# Start and test...
docker -d &
docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash

After some light testing, it works quite well for basic usage. I haven’t tested any port forwarding and front facing services yet… next step.

Obviously, this has to be automated in some better way so I plan to write an Ansible playbook for it.