Support custom components

[mbrodala]

It would be useful if one could add custom components simply based on Docker images. Something like this:

web.site:
  # ...

custom.selenium:
  image: selenium/standalone-chrome

I'm not sure this is already possible with custom images.

This is a more general approach to the issue mentioned in #364 which could a) solve a huge chunk of problems and b) open a huge can of worms. ;-)

[danhunsaker]

Give it a shot and find out? Just use data.selenium instead of custom.selenium, and go from there. It'll be a bit of trial and error, but that's how these things go. You should get all the standard env vars you'd expect elsewhere, making it easy enough to connect and run tests as desired.

One drawback is you'd have another component deployed to production that you wouldn't necessarily need/want there, so there might be an advantage to supporting a data variant that's only present in development. Be sure to add local_only: true to the data component to prevent it from deploying.

[mbrodala]

True, having that component in production wouldn't be that useful. Do you think it would make sense that Nanobox supports "Dev components" similar to dev_packages, etc.?

For now a simple cat $selenium >> boxfile.yml could help to add the component on demand.

[mbrodala]

I've now added this to my boxfile.yml (using chrome as component name to allow e.g. for firefox in the future):

data.chrome:
  image: selenium/standalone-chrome

But with nanbox run I get this error:

    data.chrome :
      √ Reserve IPs
      √ Starting docker container
      √ Attaching network
      ! Gathering requirements

Error   : bad exit code(126)
Context : failed to sync components -> failed to provision components -> failed to setup component (data.chrome) -> failed to run plan hook -> util:Exec:/opt/nanobox/hooks/plan

Enter to continue:

Any ideas how I could debug this? Manually running a container from this image works fine.

[danhunsaker]

Huh. Looks like it's requiring the Nanobox hooks to be available in the image in order to consider it running. My understanding was that the absence of hooks should only reduce some of the capabilities, not prevent images from running entirely.

[tylerflint]

That's the intent, but apparently that's not the case currently. We'll need to make issues to address these.

[lyondhill]

The plan hook is currently required. I will have to figure out how to remove that dependency. @tylerflint is it possible to run custom in production? I want to make sure both local and production are in parity.

[mbrodala]

I tried to verify this but it's not working after a nanobox-update. And what I see is indeed odd:

λ nanobox version
Nanobox version 0.9.0 (d49e35eebb806a217d5e019209d15ac0)

How can I update to the latest version (2.0.2 ATM)? I guess I'll just re-install from bundle.

[tylerflint]

Hey @mbrodala, sorry for the confusion on this. Here's a gist with instructions to upgrade to v2: https://gist.github.com/sanderson/73d91939710bf99992cdd5baf35adc89

Thanks

[mbrodala]

Thanks for the heads up, that explains a lot. ;-)