devbox

Building a portable docker based developer toolbox

• a versioned building block,
• continuously tested,
• extensible,
• portable,
• sharable.

For a more detailed discussion about the motivations and the background, see background-fr.md

Note: It is assumed that you have a Docker environment installed (or alternatively Boot2Docker). A good test is whether "docker ps" shows no errors. You will also need docker-compose.

How to use the Devbox

To use the Devbox a X client is needed. We chose "X2GO". The client part must be available on your machine.

Start the Devbox container with :

$ make start

Use the GUI

To start the Graphical User Interface to the DEVBOX, just do

make gui

And, tadahh, X2GO starts and you are in business, connected to the GUI of your Devbox.

manual startup of the GUI

On certain configurations, the startup with make fails. You can start it by hand.

Start X2GO. If you built the DEVBOX with "make", a session is automatically created. Just double click on it. Should there be an opened session (remains of a failed make guitentative), just delete it and create a new session by clicking on "new".

Use the command line

You also access the devbox in command line with 2 solutions :

• Use docker to spawn a new bash shell inside the devbox :

$ make shell

• Use SSH to access the devbox :

$ ssh dockerx@$(boot2docker ip 2>/dev/null) -p 2200

Advanced using : how to build/test/etc. the Devbox ?

After getting the latest version of the box by cloning the Git repository, position yourself in the root of directory structure so that run the various commands.

• The full build and test workflow to create the Devbox :

$ make

• To only rebuild image :

$ make build

• To run the tests only, execute :

$ make test

• To connect interactively to the Devbox, just execute :

$ make shell

• To delete your local devbox (and ERASE all your data...) :

$ make clean

How to run the presentation

(With Docker of course)

To start a containerized web server that will generate and serve the presentation locally :

$ make presentation 

To display it, start your favourite browser and point it to the address echoed on the screen, once the container is started.