crane

README

Crane

Lift containers with ease

Overview

Crane is a little tool to orchestrate Docker containers. It works by reading in some configuration (JSON or YAML) which describes how to obtain images and how to run the containers. This simplifies setting up a development environemt a lot as you don't have to bring up every container manually, remembering all the arguments you need to pass. By storing the configuration next to the data and the app(s) in a repository, you can easily share the whole environment.

Installation

Dowload the latest release, rename it to crane and put it in your path, e.g. in /usr/local/bin.

Of course, you will need to have Docker (>= 0.8) installed on your system. I generally recommend to do this on Ubuntu, but if you are on OS X, you can also try docker-osx. boot2docker is nice, but unfortunately, it does not support bind-mounting volumes yet.

Usage

Crane is a very light wrapper around the Docker commands. This means that e.g. run, rm, kill, start, stop just call the corresponding Docker commands, but for all defined containers. Additionally, there are a few special commands:

• provision either calls Docker's build or pull (depending on whether a Dockerfile is specified)
• lift will build and run the containers in one go
• status will display information about the state of the containers

You can get more information about what's happening behind the scenes by using --verbose. Some commands have a --force flag, which will save you intermediate steps, such as stopping the containers before removing them, or rebuilding images when they exist already. When you use --force to remove containers first, you can also use --kill if you're impatient. For all available commands and details on usage, just type crane.

crane.json / crane.yaml

The configuration defines an array of containers, either stored in JSON (crane.json) or YAML (crane.yaml). If a container depends on another one, it must appear before that container in the file. Every container consists of:

• name (string, required): Name of the container
• image (string, required): Name of the image to build/pull
• dockerfile (string, optional): Relative path to the Dockerfile
• run (object, optional): Parameters mapped to Docker's run.
  • cidfile (string)
  • cpu-shares (integer)
  • detach (boolean) sudo docker attach <container name> will work as normal.
  • dns (array)
  • env (array)
  • env-file (string)
  • expose (array) Ports to expose to linked containers.
  • hostname (string)
  • interactive (boolean)
  • link (array) Link containers.
  • lxc-conf (array)
  • memory (string)
  • privileged (boolean)
  • publish (array) Map network ports to the container.
  • publish-all (boolean)
  • rm (boolean)
  • tty (boolean)
  • user (string)
  • volume (array) In contrast to plain Docker, the host path can be relative.
  • volumes-from (array) Mount volumes from other containers
  • workdir (string)
  • cmd (array/string) Command to append to docker run (overwriting CMD).

See the Docker documentation for more details about the parameters.

The container configruation can also be read from a string (given via --config). This is handy if you want to use Crane to lift containers over SSH. For example, you can bring up a container (running Pry in this case) like this:

crane lift --config='{"containers":[{"name":"pry", "image":"d11wtq/ruby", "run":{"tty": true, "interactive": true, "cmd": "pry"}}]}'

At the moment, there is no easy way to read in a local configuration and execute it remotely, but that is certainly possible and might be added in the future.

Example

For demonstration purposes, we'll bring up a PHP app (served by Apache) that depends both on a MySQL database and a Memcached server. The source code is available at http://github.com/michaelsauter/crane-example. Here's what the crane.json looks like:

{
	"containers": [
		{
			"name": "crane_apache",
			"dockerfile": "apache",
			"image": "icrane_apache",
			"run": {
				"volumes-from": ["crane_app"],
				"publish": ["80:80"],
				"link": ["crane_mysql:db", "crane_memcached:cache"],
				"detach": true
			}
		},
		{
			"name": "crane_app",
			"dockerfile": "app",
			"image": "icrane_app",
			"run": {
				"volume": ["app/www:/srv/www:rw"],
				"detach": true
			}
		},
		{
			"name": "crane_mysql",
			"dockerfile": "mysql",
			"image": "icrane_mysql",
			"run": {
				"detach": true
			}
		},
		{
			"name": "crane_memcached",
			"dockerfile": "memcached",
			"image": "icrane_memcached",
			"run": {
				"detach": true
			}
		}
	]
}

If you have Docker installed, you can just clone that repository and bring up the environment right now. In the folder where the crane.json is, type:

[sudo] crane lift

This will bring up the containers. The container running Apache has the MySQL and Memcached containers automatically linked. Open http://localhost and you should be greeted with "Hello World".

If you want to use YAML instead of JSON, here's what a simple configuration looks like:

containers:
	- name: pry
		image: d11wtq/ruby
		run:
			interactive: true
			tty: true
			cmd: pry

Advanced Usage

Next to containers, you can also specify groups, and then execute Crane commands that only target those groups. If you do not specify a group, the command will apply to all containers. Also, every container automatically forms a group, so you can use the name of each container as an argument to the group option. Additionally, you can specify more groups like this (YAML shown):

groups:
	databases: ["database1", "database2"]
	development: ["container1", "container2"]

This could be used like so: crane provision --group="container1" or crane run --group="databases".

Other Crane-backed environments

• Silex + Nginx/php-fpm + MySQL
• Symfony2 + Apache + MySQL
• Sinatra + PostrgeSQL