Lightweight Docker experience on OSX

zaiste.net

31 points·zaiste··7 comments

The problem is that you still need VirtualBox AND Linux. I don't see how this is lighter weight...other than a 24MB image instead of a 160MB image.

I'm guessing you haven't heard of TinyCore Linux[0] before. It's tiny. It fits entirely in RAM and boots in 5 seconds on 10-year-old hardware.

[0]: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/

Still need virtualbox.

I think the author meant light weight in terms of usage complexity, not system resources.

Hmm this replaces Vagrant (which I know and like) with a custom script (https://raw.github.com/steeve/boot2docker/master/boot2docker) which I have to learn.

Also running docker on a non-ubuntu host means you're doing it differently than 95% of people out there, so you'll be on your own when it comes to mysterious errors and the like.

In case you're feeling brave, here's an anecdote from just this morning. My colleague ran into a mysql bug on docker he couldn't figure out. Googling the error messsage + "docker" instantly produced this page http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21026790/cant-delete-mysq... where it was explained that by using ubuntu 13.10 instead of 12.04 would make the problem go away... saving us many hours of further debugging. What good would that advice do if we were using TinyCore Linux?

But isn't one of the promises of docker that you can use the same package regardless of underlying OS?

My lightweight experience is a little different. I didn't want to run a VM on my MacBook Air and I already run VMs locally on my Mac Mini so an alias to the Ubuntu VM on my mini lets me run the Docker client without anything else on my Air.

alias docker='docker -H=tcp://10.0.5.3:5555'

A DynDNS + NAT rule on my router lets me connect when I'm not home.

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