[chewchew]

Docker gives you the building blocks, but that means you have more pieces to arrange and manage. Take a look at Docker Compose if you haven't already, since the Docker CLI only gets you so far when you're creating apps that consist of multiple containers.

I think the best approach for your cert issue is to abstract that into a separate service (nginx is an option, but I'd recommend the Rancher approach below). Yes, that means you have to add another container, but that's just another block in your docker-compose.yml file. Embrace the approach of separating your components into containers and organizing them as a stack. You can easily link containers together, share data volumes, and start/stop individual containers or the stack as a whole.

The problems that you're having are pretty easy to fix with some tooling. Rancher (http://rancher.com/) greatly simplifies the cert issue by allowing you to import certs and provide them to the Rancher loadbalancer service (which you can add to any stack). There's also a LetsEncrypt community catalog template that automatically retrieves and imports certificates to Rancher. There are other open source orchestrators like DCOS, but Rancher is probably the simplest to use, and it's the only one I'm very familiar with. There are SaaS options that you can look into, but I don't have experience with them.

As for the container crashes, it's trivial to automatically restart them. Just pass the --restart=always flag to the Docker run command. You can also add the flag to a docker-compose.yml file.

[beachstartup]

> but that means you have more pieces to arrange and manage

wait. aren't these things supposed to give us less pieces to arrange and manage?

> The problems that you're having are pretty easy to fix with some tooling

yes, of course the solution is more tools. what exactly was the problem again?

[chewchew]

> wait. aren't these things supposed to give us less pieces to arrange and manage? No, not fewer pieces. You'll have more pieces, but you can combine the pieces and control them individually or as a group. You can think of Legos, since you have many pieces but they all fit together in the same way.

Docker compose lets you group these containers together, and that is what ultimately makes it feel like you have fewer pieces to manage. With that, you can start/stop a stack of containers (e.g. django, nginx, postgres, redis) with a single command, but still inspect and manage each component separately. This is something you might normally do with bash scripts, but with Docker you can take that same app to an orchestration platform and run it on any host. Run it on your laptop, run it on a linux server, run it on a SaaS provider like Docker Cloud, run it on a private cloud with an orchestration platform.

> yes, of course the solution is more tools. what exactly was the problem again? Docker is just the foundation. Nothing more. I'm fine with learning more tools because I feel that the foundation is solid. The problem is being able to ship and manage your apps. That is much, much easier for me now and I'm very glad I invested the time.

[pm90]

Its somewhat akin to microservices, where you split each functionality into its own service rather than having one monolith do everything.

[tigershark]

Seriously? If something crashes continuously in production then the solution is "just pass the --restart=always flag. I really wonder if you guys are really using docker in prod. I would never use something like that to manage important transactions.

[X86BSD]

No the correct solution is to debug the issue not just reboot/restart/reinit the damn thing.

This mentality is WHY Linux/docker/containers/Linux worlds NIH syndrome, is such a tire fire.

[chewchew]

It's not one or the other. Restarting might save you some downtime if you're running a single IRC container. That doesn't mean you shouldn't find and resolve the root issue. Normally I just rollback to the previous version container if I have a recurring issue.

Windows containers are now available, if you can't stand linux: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

Anyway, don't use containers if you don't want to. I'm glad I invested the time since I understand them very well and use them to my advantage. But I did have to learn a lot and experiment with a bunch of tools, and maybe that's not worth it to you.

[chewchew]

As someone said, this is the normal behavior in the Erlang/Elixir world, and it seems to have worked extremely well for the telecom industry.

That said, my reply was to someone running an IRC server, presumably on a single server, so don't stretch my advice to a production app handling millions of transactions. Obviously the core issue is that the app crashes, and it's still up to him to fix that. This is almost certainly a problem with his app/config, not Docker itself (though it ain't perfect). If it's something that happens every 6 months, then auto restarting will probably save him a lot of problems. If your transactions are so precious, don't pass the flag- it's up to you.

[LgWoodenBadger]

Isn't this the much-lauded and respected Erlang approach to failures?

[tigershark]

I never used Erlang, so I have no idea if it follows the same approach(although I find it quite strange). But for sure I can't afford to deploy anything like that in prod. You lose one transaction in the middle and several millions go lost. I'd rather lose an hand than try to explain my clients that it is fine, docker just restarted by itself as expected..

[dancek]

Thanks, I'll have to look into Rancher. I'm already using Docker-compose.

Also good to know about automatic restarts. I don't know how I missed that, I had to read a lot of docs to get where I am.

Still, the amount of tooling that exists and the knowledge needed to pick the right ones for a given situation goes to show that this isn't as simple as packing a shipping container and letting someone ship it...

[chewchew]

You're right, it's not quite that easy yet, but it probably will be eventually. Docker just provides the building blocks. SaaS providers like Docker Cloud will get better and continue to abstract complexity away until it really is that easy.

You don't need to use Rancher if you're just running one app. If that's all you need to do, then it could be as simple as running docker-compose on a linux server and mounting the certs into the nginx container as a host volume (https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy). This is a fine approach until you want to split your containers across several hosts (redundancy or scaling) and you have several apps to worry about.

[holografix]

Hey chewchew you seem to be knowledgeable on docker-compose.

What's the easiest way to get a .yml on a cloud server somewhere and let it assemble it assemble the containers for you?

Also, do you know where containers set environment variables? The official Postgres makes available something like PG_PORT_3542 and u can just refer to it from another container. Where I can't seem to do the same with the Redis one...

[chewchew]

The absolute easiest is probably Docker Cloud. I've checked it out but haven't really used it much. It's still relatively immature but if you just want to deploy and forget something simple, this is probably the way to go.

If you want to use your own Linux host, then the simplest way would probably just be to SSH into the box, git pull, and run "docker-compose build && docker-compose up".

Setting environment variables is pretty easy, but I don't think you need them in this case. If you're trying to make a redis or postgres container available to another container (your app), then you can do so easily with links in docker-compose. Something like:

    myapp:
        image: myimage:0.0.1
        command: cmd to run
        links:
        - redis:redis
        ports:
        - 80:8000
        environment:
        - hardcoded_var=my_env_value
        - var_from_host=${host_var}
    redis:
        image: redis:latest

You can then access redis from the myapp service using the hostname "redis" and the default port "6379". So, "telnet redis 6379" would work from the myapp container (assuming telnet is actually installed). The redis port isn't even publicly exposed- it's only available to myapp.

If you need to define environment variables, you can do so with an environment dict as shown above. There are a few other ways to define env vars:

https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#variable-subst...

https://docs.docker.com/compose/environment-variables/#/the-...

[holografix]

Thanks chewchew so much win in this reply. I use Heroku a lot and was wondering if there is a "believable" alternative using Docker.

[jameskegel]

kubernetes allows you to upload a yaml snippet and launch, which sounds like what you described.