A tiny init for docker containers

Hey maybe your Docker file contains something like this:

CMD ["/bin/node", "app.js"]

Oh no this is no good! - TLDR: Your process can get shutdown in a bad way and zombie processes will eat your container!

Instead just use lovely_touching:

1. Download it (this binary will work on any Linux version from Centos/Redhat 5 and up):

   wget https://github.com/ohjames/lovely_touching/releases/download/v0.1.0/lovely_touching
   chmod a+x lovely_touching
   

2. Change your Dockerfile to this:

   ADD lovely_touching /bin/lovely_touching
   CMD ["/bin/lovely_touching", "--", "/bin/node", "app.js" ]
   

Now you don't have to worry anymore!

lovely_touching is written in rust so you don't need anything installed in the host machine to use the binary.

Building

cargo build --release

Or to build a copy against Centos5's glibc (so it can run on more machines) first install docker, then run this as a user with access to docker:

./build-release.sh

More stuff

If you want to run multiple processes you can separate them with the argument ---:

ADD lovely_touching /bin/lovely_touching
CMD ["/bin/lovely_touching", "--", "/bin/runit", "---", "/bin/node", "app.js" ]

If you want an init system with even less overhead then try smell-baron which implements the same functionality in C. The binary ends up being around 8k instead of the 800k needed by the rust runtime.