Understand dockers

[shysteph]

Add the ability to give pleasestart either the name of an existing docker container to start or an image and parameters to run and have pleasestart manage all of the docker commands to make stuff happen.

[jordansissel]

@bobprime If you have an idea of how this might feel on the command line (or general usage), would you mind sketching out some kind of example?

Something like pleasestart -p docker my-container-name ?

[jordansissel]

I'm also only really familiar with Docker as it was in 0.7, and that was quite some time ago. Any details (links to docs, examples, etc) on how folks manage linked containers today would help this become implemented. <3

[shysteph]

I am unfortunately new to docker myself and finding any sort of best practices is impossible. I run my containers with a --name container_name and containers that link to them with --link container_name:container_name. I think this data comes out in docker inspect.

The setup I am dealing with emulates 3 servers. I start a database container named db. Then start an application container named tomcat and linked via --link db:db which puts a entry in the /etc/hosts file with the ip of the db container so my tomcat instance can talk to it over the network. Then I start my load balancing reverse proxy that is linked to the application container.

In a production environment these may very well be seperate machines but on a dev workstation or test server it is often convenient to run them all together and use pleasestart to make the magical startup scripts as I have no clue how to write systemd scripts.

If I am remembering pleasestart the -p is for the host platform so it would either need to be a different argument or understand anything that starts with "docker name" is actually looking to be serviced via docker.