carrier

Overview

Is a sandbox environment and appliance fabricator. It mainly relies on the docker technology therefore, any environment that can natively use docker should be able to use carrier. However, carrier can also be used on environment that cannot use docker natively. To operate, Vagrant is used alongside Virtualbox (as a provider) to provide a valid docker environment (based on archlinux). This installation provides a pre-configured docker host and docker-compose. carrier can be seen as a solution to facilitate :

• docker image building process
• docker image composition
• docker image reusability
• docker appliance building
• docker appliance execution
• docker appliance persistant storage management (yet to come)

To summarize :

+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| carrier                                                   |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                           |
| +--------+ } related to image                             |
| | docker | } building, composition                        |
| +--------+ } and reusability                              |
| | images |                                                |
| | …      |                                                |
| |   +----+-----------+ } related to appliance build and   |
| |   | docker-compose | } management as well as containers |
| +---+----------------+ } persistent storages              |
|     | volumes        |                                    |
|     | …              |                                    |
|     +----------------+                                    |
|                                                           |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

Note for users

carrier is under heavy development. It means that several drastic changes could occur in short period of time leading for instance to a whole re-architecture of folders, complete rewriting of scripts and spurious feature changes.

A word on Vagrant and Virtualbox provider

One can choose to use the provided Vagrant oriented facilities to use carrier. The provided vagrant box is a minimalist Archlinux installation with a particular partition layout. By the way, except for the /boot mount point, all partitions are LVM2 based. Using LVM2 ensure a good scaleability for each related partitions as it allows one to extend volume groups (system and docker-related) as well as resize up logical volumes (for instance, one can size up the logical volume used to store docker persistent volumes).

Designed mount points

• /boot : vfat type, EFI, really small, (64 MB)
• / : LVM2, extendable, (4GB)
• /var/lib/docker : LVM2, extendable, noexec, nodev, nosuid, (8GB)
• /var/lib/docker/volumes : LVM2, extendable, nosuid, (8GB)

Vagrant shared folders

• /vagrant : classical shared folder created by Vagrant itself
• /docker : added mount point pointing on the docker directory of the carrier repository, to facilitate carrier's scripts usage from within the VM.

Usage

Creating the working environment using Vagrant facilities

This section describes how to use the Vagrant environment provided with the carrier repository. It is not a mandatory step unless you're working on a platform that does not support docker and docker-compose natively. On the other hand, VirtualBox (5.2.12+) and Vagrant (2.0.3+) are needed.

Setup

Go to the vagrant/Box4Docker directory. You'll find a Vagrantfile describing the box. A simple vagrant up should does the job and create a viable environment to work with. vagrant ssh will allow you to enter the environment's shell and begin to work with carrier. As stated above, a /docker mount point is linked to the docker/ directory of the carrier repository and ease the carrier's scripts usage.

Working on existing docker host

Preprequisite : be on an environment where docker and docker-compose are supported and installed.