Time2Start with Boot2Docker

Docker is all the rage these days, or at least some serious conversations around the potential use-cases. In the same way that we saw virtualization become a core part of nearly every data center, the application environment is about to go through an evolution. PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offerings are becoming much more commonly used such as Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift to name a few. The next evolution is the containerized infrastructure to deploy application workloads across any cloud or server, which seems like a potential panacea for application developers.

One of the cool things that the Docker community has done for enabling Docker testing is to make Boot2Docker. This is sn OSX application environment to be able to launch and configure Docker from your Mac. How cool is that?!

Using this nifty environment, you can now test our different Docker configurations using the same core commands and features that you will encounter on a regular Docker platform.

Installing Boot2Docker

Luckily the process is simple for the Boot2Docker installation, and we start out by going to get the code here: http://boot2docker.io/ which is available for both Windows and Mac.

In my example I’m going to run this for the Mac. I’ve downloaded the PKG file from the link which takes me to the Github page:

00-github

Run the installer. You may be prompted for credentials to install on the Mac and Windows. Login as needed to allow the application installer to run.

01-b2d-install

Take all the defaults, and proceed with the installer until you get the final summary page:

02-b2d-install-done

It’s just that easy! Now you can look for the icon in your Applications folder and launch your new Boot2Docker:

03-icon

Once the applications launches, you will see this nifty window pop up:

04-running

This is working Docker environment running as a nested VM in order to present the full shell environment for you. Ironically, it’s like a containerized version of Docker.

While this is the end of the road for the installation process, this is just the start of what we can do with Docker. First thing you should do after this is to do a little further reading, and I would really suggest picking up the Docker Book by James Turnbull that I reviewed recently. In the mean time, you can also noodle around with some basic Docker command and get familiar with it.

When in doubt, just use the docker command which will give you the help for the docker client:

05-docker-command

Here’s s hint as to why we did this…lets just say I have some cool Docker content coming 😉

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