Docker: Getting Started Guide

jclouds-docker is a local cloud provider modelled on docker. Similar to other jclouds supported providers, it supports the same portable abstractions offered by jclouds.

In order to mimic the behavior of the nodes that jclouds is able to manage, we need to make the Docker containers similar to any other VM. Fortunately, to have that is not much work: the only prerequisite is that the node needs to be ssh’able. This involves dockerizing an SSH daemon service.

Give it a try!

• Install Docker
• Ensure you are using a recent JDK 7
• Setup your project to include docker
  • Get the dependency org.apache.jclouds.labs/docker using jclouds Installation.
• Start coding

// get a context with docker that offers the portable ComputeService api
ComputeServiceContext context = ContextBuilder.newBuilder("docker")
                      .credentials(email, password)
                      .modules(ImmutableSet.<Module> of(new Log4JLoggingModule(),
                                                        new SshjSshClientModule()))
                      .buildView(ComputeServiceContext.class);
ComputeService client = context.getComputeService();

String sshableImageId = "your-sshable-image-id"; // this can be obtained using `docker images --no-trunc` command
Template template = client.templateBuilder().imageId(sshableImageId).build();

// run a couple nodes accessible via group container
Set<? extends NodeMetadata> nodes = client.runNodesInGroup("container", 2, template);

// release resources
context.close();

As for any other jclouds API, this code will create for you 2 nodes in the group container using the provided template. The only (big) difference is that jclouds-docker will spin up 2 docker containers for you, instead of being 2 plain-old virtual machines, as it generally happens for the other cloud providers.