54 posts tagged “docker”
2019
Smaller Python Docker Containers with Multi-Stage Builds and Python Wheels (via) Clear tutorial on how to use Docker’s multi-stage build feature to create smaller final images by taking advantage of Python’s wheel format—so an initial stage can install a full compiler toolchain and compile C dependencies into wheels, then a later stage can install those pre-compiled wheels into a slimmer container without including the C compiler.
Ministry of Silly Runtimes: Vintage Python on Cloud Run (via) Cloud Run is an exciting new hosting service from Google that lets you define a container using a Dockerfile and then run that container in a “scale to zero” environment, so you only pay for time spent serving traffic. It’s similar to the now-deprecated Zeit Now 1.0 which inspired me to create Datasette. Here Dustin Ingram demonstrates how powerful Docker can be as the underlying abstraction by deploying a web app using a 25 year old version of Python 1.x.
2018
repo2docker (via) Neat tool from the Jupyter project team: run “jupyter-repo2docker https://github.com/norvig/pytudes” and it will pull a GitHub repository, create a new Docker container for it, install Jupyter and launch a Jupyter instance for you to start trying out the library. I’ve been doing this by hand using virtual environments, but using Docker for even cleaner isolation seems like a smart improvement.
dive (via) Handy command-line tool (as with so much of the Docker ecosystem it’s written in Go, which means you can download a Darwin binary directly from the GitHub releases page and run it directly on your Mac) for visually exploring the different layers of a given Docker image.
Building smaller Python Docker images
Changes are afoot at Zeit Now, my preferred hosting provider for the past year (see previous posts). They have announced Now 2.0, an intriguing new approach to providing auto-scaling immutable deployments. It’s built on top of lambdas, and comes with a whole host of new constraints: code needs to fit into a 5MB bundle for example (though it looks like this restriction will soon be relaxed a little—update November 19th you can now bump this up to 50MB).
[... 1,872 words]elasticsearch-dump. Neat open source utility by TaskRabbit for importing and exporting data in bulk from Elasticsearch. It can copy data from one Elasticsearch cluster directly to another or to an intermediary file, making it a swiss-army knife for migrating data around. I successfully used the “docker run” incantation to execute it without needing to worry about having the correct version of Node.js installed.
rubber-docker/linux.c. rubber-docker is a workshop that talks through building a simply Docker clone from scratch in Python. I particularly liked this detail: linux.c is a Python extension written in C that exposes a small collection of Linux syscalls that are needed for the project—clone, mount, pivot_root, setns, umount, umount2 and unshare. Just reading through this module gives a really nice overview of how some of Docker’s underlying magic actually work.
Cloud-first: Rapid webapp deployment using containers (via) The Research Software Engineering group at ICL have written a tutorial on deploying web apps as Docker containers using Azure and they use Datasette as the example application.
Andrew Godwin’s www-router Docker container (via) Really clever Docker trick: a container that runs Nginx and uses it to route traffic to other containers based on the hostname—but the hostnames to be routed are configured using environment variables which the run-nginx.py CMD script uses to dynamically construct an nginx config when the container starts.
Building a Full-Text Search App Using Docker and Elasticsearch. Deep, comprehensive tutorial from Patrick Triest showing how to use docker-compose to run three containers (Node API, nginx static content, elasticsearch) and then use that to build a neat Vue.js web search UI against 100 books from Project Gutenberg.
2017
How to compile and run a Pony program using Docker. My notes on using the Docker ponylang/ponyc container to compile and execute a Pony program without needing to install anything (since Docker will download and run the image the first time you run the command).
Building a location to time zone API with SpatiaLite, OpenStreetMap and Datasette
Given a latitude and longitude, how can we tell what time zone that point lies within? Here’s how I built a simple JSON API to answer that question, using a combination of data from OpenStreetMap, the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite and my Datasette API tool.
[... 2,185 words]Inside Docker’s “FROM scratch” (via) I’m a big fan of understanding your abstractions. Here’s a neat tutorial that dives deep into Docker’s “scratch” image which offers the smallest possible Docker image, and hence provides a great opportunity to understand what a Docker container at its most minimal does for you.
Run the First Edition of Unix (1972) with Docker
(via)
This is so cool... run docker run --rm -it bahamat/unix-1st-ed to drop into a simulation of a PDP-11 running genuine 1972 era Unix! If you haven't got into Docker yet, Docker for Mac is a single click install these days and works incredibly well.
gzthermal-web
(via)
I built a quick web application wrapping the gzthermal gzip visualization tool and deployed it to Zeit Now wrapped up in a Docker container. Give it a URL and it shows you a PNG visualization of how gzip encodes that page.
tuxracer-web.
Brilliant Docker hack from David Cooper: run docker run -p 8008:80 dtcooper/tuxracer-web to get Tux Racer (the 3D game) running in your browser, on top a cunning mix of the noVNC HTML5 VNC client and icecast for sound.
Datasette: instantly create and publish an API for your SQLite databases
I just shipped the first public version of datasette, a new tool for creating and publishing JSON APIs for SQLite databases.
[... 968 words]Docker.qcow2 never shrinks—disk space usage leak in docker for mac (via) Interesting year-long thread on disk usage by Docker for Mac, including a bunch of potential workarounds for if it swallows too much disk space.
Docker Containers on the Desktop (via) Jessie Frazelle’s classic explanation from 2015 of how she runs every desktop application on her Linux machine in its own Docker container.
Running a load testing Go utility using Docker for Mac
I’m playing around with Zeit Now at the moment (see my previous entry) and decided to hit it with some traffic using Apache Bench. I got this SSL handshake error:
[... 818 words]arxiv-vanity (via) Beautiful new project from Ben Firshman and Andreas Jansson: “Arxiv Vanity renders academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF”. It works by pulling the raw LaTeX source code from Arxiv and rendering it to HTML using a heavily customized Pandoc workflow. The real fun is in the architecture: it’s a Django app running on Heroku which fires up on-demand Hyper.sh Docker containers for each individual rendering job.
A Brief Intro to Docker for Djangonauts (via) This is great—a really clear introduction to both Docker and Docker Compose, aimed at Django developers. Includes line-by-line annotations of an example Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml.
Deploying an asynchronous Python microservice with Sanic and Zeit Now
Back in 2008 Natalie Downe and I deployed what today we would call a microservice: json-head, a tiny Google App Engine app that allowed you to make an HTTP head request against a URL and get back the HTTP headers as JSON. One of our initial use-scase for this was Natalie’s addSizes.js, an unobtrusive jQuery script that could annotate links to PDFs and other large files with their corresponding file size pulled from the Content-Length header. Another potential use-case is detecting broken links, since the API can be used to spot 404 status codes (as in this example).