Create an LXC container from a local centos template (tar.gz) - linux

I have a custom centos, where we made some changes, and I would like to create a LXC from that template. Is it possible ?

Possible? Yes.
depending on the custom centos and if you need to run it privileged or not, it can get really complicated. The basics are easy though.
For lxc v1 , you just need to create config file for container in /var/lib/lxc or whatever your lxc path is and untar the rootfs somewhere lxc can access, set its path in config and try to run it.
It would be best if you first make a normal centos container, look where it has config,rootfs , what file permissions it has, network config and so on.
Then you just try to mirror its config for your own image.
if it doesn't start right away , try starting in foreground (-F ) and/or look in logfile .
For lxd it is mostly the same, but you need to create the image and put it in your local repository. It is mostly covered in https://osso.nl/blog/lxc-create-image-debian-squeeze/

Related

Why a vendor/node_modules mapping in a volume is considered a bad practise?

Could someone explain me what is happening when you map (in a volume) your vendor or node_module files?
I had some speed problems of docker environment and red that I don't need to map vendor files there, so I excluded it in docker-compose.yml file and the speed was much faster instantly.
So I wonder what is happening under the hood if you have vendor files mapped in your volume and what's happening when you don't?
Could someone explain that? I think this information would be useful to more than only me.
Docker does some complicated filesystem setup when you start a container. You have your image, which contains your application code; a container filesystem, which gets lost when the container exits; and volumes, which have persistent long-term storage outside the container. Volumes break down into two main flavors, bind mounts of specific host directories and named volumes managed by the Docker daemon.
The standard design pattern is that an image is totally self-contained. Once I have an image I should be able to push it to a registry and run it on another machine unmodified.
git clone git#github.com:me/myapp
cd myapp
docker build -t me/myapp . # requires source code
docker push me/myapp
ssh me#othersystem
docker run me/myapp # source code is in the image
# I don't need GitHub credentials to get it
There's three big problems with using volumes to store your application or your node_modules directory:
It breaks the "code goes in the image" pattern. In an actual production environment, you wouldn't want to push your image and also separately push the code; that defeats one of the big advantages of Docker. If you're hiding every last byte of code in the image during the development cycle, you're never actually running what you're shipping out.
Docker considers volumes to contain vital user data that it can't safely modify. That means that, if your node_modules tree is in a volume, and you add a package to your package.json file, Docker will keep using the old node_modules directory, because it can't modify the vital user data you've told it is there.
On MacOS in particular, bind mounts are extremely slow, and if you mount a large application into a container it will just crawl.
I've generally found three good uses for volumes: storing actual user data across container executions; injecting configuration files at startup time; and reading out log files. Code and libraries are not good things to keep in volumes.
For front-end applications in particular there doesn't seem to be much benefit to trying to run them in Docker. Since the actual application code runs in the browser, it can't directly access any Docker-hosted resources, and there's no difference if your dev server runs in Docker or not. The typical build chains involving tools like Typescript and Webpack don't have additional host dependencies, so your Docker setup really just turns into a roundabout way to run Node against the source code that's only on your host. The production path of building your application into static files and then using a Web server like nginx to serve them is still right in Docker. I'd just run Node on the host to develop this sort of thing, and not have to think about questions like this one.

Using existing Ansible roles to create a custom Docker image

I currently use Ansible to manage and deploy a fleet of servers.
I wish to start using Docker for some applications and would like to build a Docker image using the same scripts we use to configure on non Dockerized hosts.
For example we have an Ansible role that builds Nginx with 3rd party modules, would like to use the same role to build a Docker image with the custom Nginx.
Any ideas how I would get this done?
There is the "Ansible Container" project, https://www.ansible.com/integrations/containers/ansible-container. That page points also to the github repo.
It is not clear how well maintained it is, but their reasoning and approach makes sense.
Consider that you might have some adjustments to do regarding two aspects:
a container should do only one thing (microservice)
how to pass configuration to the container at runtime (Docker has some guidelines, such as environmental variables if possible or mounting a volume with the configuration files)
That's a perfect example where the docker-systemctl-replacement script should be used.
It has been developed to allow ansible scripts to target both virtual machines and docker containers. It had been developed when distros did switch to systemd which was hard to enable for containers. When overwriting /usr/bin/systemctl then the docker container will then look good enough for ansible that all the old scripts will continue to run, installing rpm/deb, and having 'service:'s started and enabled.

Is it possible to stop duplicating docker images?

We have On-premises software docker image.Also, We have licensing for application security and code duplication.
But to add extra security is it possible to do any of the below ?
Can we lock docker image such that no one can copy or save running container and start new docker container in another environment.
or is it possible to change something in docker image while build that may prevent user to login inside container.
Goal is to secure docker images as much as possible in terms of duplication of the docker images and stop login inside running container to see the configuration.
No. Docker images are a well known format with an open specification that is essentially a set of tar files and some json metadata. Once someone has this image, they can do with it what they want. This includes running it with any options they'd like, coping it, and extending it with their own changes.

Persisting content across docker restart within an Azure Web App

I'm trying to run a ghost docker image on Azure within a Linux Docker container. This is incredibly easy to get up and running using a custom Docker image for Azure Web App on Linux and pointing it at the official docker hub image for ghost.
Unfortunately the official docker image stores all data on the /var/lib/ghost path which isn't persisted across restarts so whenever the container is restarted all my content get's deleted and I end up back at a default ghost install.
Azure won't let me execute arbitrary commands you basically point it at a docker image and it fires off from there so I can't use the -v command line param to map a volume. The docker image does have an entry point configured if that would help.
Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!
Set WEBSITES_ENABLE_APP_SERVICE_STORAGE to true in appsettings and the home directory would be mapped from your outer kudo instance:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/containers/app-service-linux-faq
You have a few options:
You could mount a file share inside the Docker container by creating a custom image, then storing data there. See these docs for more details.
You could switch to the new container instances, as they provide volume support.
You could switch to the Azure Container Service. This requires an orchestrator, like Kubernetes, and might be more work than you're looking for, but it also offers more flexibility, provides better reliability and scaling, and other benefits.
You have to use a shared volume that map the content of the container /var/lib/ghost directory to a host directory. This way, your data will persist in your host directory.
To do that, use the following command.
$ docker run -d --name some-ghost -p 3001:2368 -v /path/to/ghost/blog:/var/lib/ghost/content ghost:1-alpine
I never worked with Azure, so I'm not 100 percent sure the following applies. But if you interface docker via the CLI there is a good chance it applies.
Persistency in docker is handled with volumes. They are basically mounts inside the container's file system tree to a directory on the outside. From your text I understand that you want store the content of the inside /var/lib/ghost path in /home/site/wwwroot on the outside. To do this you would call docker like this:
$ docker run [...] -v /var/lib/ghost:/home/site/wwwroot ghost
Unfortunately setting the persistent storage (or bring your own storage) to a specific path is currently not supported in Azure Web Apps on Linux.
That's said, you can play with ssh and try and configure ghost to point to /home/ instead of /var/lib/.
I have prepared a docker image here: https://hub.docker.com/r/elnably/ghost-on-azure that adds the ssh capability the dockerfile and code can be found here: https://github.com/ahmedelnably/ghost-on-azure/tree/master/1/alpine.
try it out by configuring you web app to use elnably/ghost-on-azure:latest, browse to the site (to start the container) and go to the ssh page .scm.azurewebsites.net, to learn more about SSH check this link: https://aka.ms/linux-ssh.

Is it safe to extract the root filesystem of a Docker.io image and use it in a chroot?

I have recently discovered Docker, and I think it's a great tool for managing my runtime environments. However, I also have some OpenVZ VPS'es that don't support LXC, so I'm thinking about using docker export to export the filesystem of an image, extract the resulting tarball to a directory in the VPS, and then chroot into that directory and run the services inside the image.
Is it safe to do this? What customizations does Docker make to the filesystem of its image (I can see a .dockerinit file in the root directory at first glance)? Any tips & pitfalls of this approach?
The main risk would be isolation. If your OpenVZ is properly configured and warranty the isolation, you are good to go.
Docker does not do any modification to the file system. At runtime, it mounts itself as .dockerinit. We use this in order to setup the user/group and network once the container is started.
In future version, docker will support different isolation backend like libvirt or even chroot. The base image aren't going to change though, so there is no problem using docker images on OpenVZ.

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