floki

Floki was a boatbuilder. Floki now helps you launch build containers.

What is floki?

floki aims to improve the human interface for launching and using interactive docker containers. Instead of remembering or constructing complicated docker run commands, or writing custom scripts to launch docker containers, floki lets you specify what you want from your docker container in a configuration file. You can then get your environment just by running floki.

This has several advantages over the usual approaches (custom scripts, or, more commonly, leaving it to the user to figure out)

• easier to use
• easier to share
• if adopted across multiple projects, it provides a consistent and uniform interface to get a working environment

Documentation

For installation, and basic usage, see getting started.

Full documentation can be found here.

Install

Precompiled binaries can be downloaded from the releases page (for linux and OSX).

To obtain curl and extract the latest linux binary directly in your shell, run

$ curl -L https://github.com/Metaswitch/floki/releases/download/0.4.3/floki-0.4.3-linux.tar.gz | tar xzvf -

You should be able to run floki from your working directory:

$ ./floki --version
floki 0.4.3

Move it onto your path to run it from anywhere. E.g.

# mv floki /usr/local/bin/

Enjoy!

Prerequisites

It's recommended you add your user to the docker group:

sudo usermod -a -G docker USERNAME

and logout and in again to pick up the changes.

Alternatively you can run floki with sudo -E floki.

Basic usage

floki allows you to launch interactive containers with your working directory mounted, and to configure those containers for interactive use.

Provide a floki.yaml in the root directory of your source code, in the following form:

image: $IMAGE_NAME
init:
  - echo "Hello, there"

or to use a local Dockerfile

image:
  build:
    name: name_of_resultant_image
    dockerfile: Dockerfile.build
init:
  - echo "Hello, there"

and run floki in that directory. You should be dropped into a shell with the init commands run, and inside a directory where your host working directory has been mounted.

Handy features

• Forwarding of ssh-agent (useful for authenticating with remote private git servers to pull private dependencies)
• Docker-in-docker support
• Forwarding of host user information (allows non-root users to be added and used).

Contributing

Contributors will need to sign there commits to acknowledge the DCO

TODO

See issues.