Jenkins and Docker – Part One

September 12, 2014 - Reading time: 4 minutes

This post lists the steps taken to get started with Docker – the basic install and getting a Docker container up and running on Ubuntu.

There’s nothing new or unusual in this section, but it forms the background of the next post(s) where I plan to go in to detail on different approaches to using Docker with Jenkins (and vice versa).

If you’re unfamiliar with Docker here is a good introduction:

and you can try Docker out easily on the docker site: https://www.docker.com/tryit/

In my case the Ubuntu is a pretty ordinary “ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-35-generic x86_64)” running as a guest VM on my Development VM Ware ESXi Server.

Installing docker on Ubuntu is trivial – here are the commands I found via a quick google, there were no issues…

apt-get -y install docker.io

(FYI it’s called docker.io as there’s a previous/existing package with the name docker)

fix path issues:

ln -sf /usr/bin/docker.io /usr/local/bin/docker
sed -i '$acomplete -F _docker docker' /etc/bash_completion.d/docker.io

have docker start up at boot:

update-rc.d docker.io defaults

and that’s that done – all very simple, quick and straightforward, now it’s time to pull down an Ubuntu image…

docker pull ubuntu

once that’s done, you are ready to run a command (bash in the case of this quick test I found suggested elsewhere) in a docker container like so:

docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash

(-i attaches stdin & stdout and -t allocates a terminal)

That’s it for this post – the next will look at dynamic Jenkins Slave provisioning using Docker Containers, Jenkins plugins for Docker and ways to use Docker for a variety of Jenkins build, deployment and test tasks for Continuous Integration, Continuous Build and DevOps purposes.

Cheers,

Don