Using Docker containers to test Perl installations on multiple Linux versions

Learn Go and Join the Fun

On Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10, the Docker service can be easily installed with this command:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-extra-`uname -r`

Previous versions require a kernel patch [5]. After a reboot of the host, the client communicates with the functional Docker daemon (status: version 0.8.1) via a Linux socket belonging to root in /var/run/docker.sock. Users can therefore choose between issuing all Docker commands as root or ditching all security concerns overboard and giving the whole world write permissions for the socket. In the long term, Docker will maybe want to design more acceptable ownership conditions, although this is, admittedly, not entirely trivial.

All told, Docker currently is probably one of the hottest projects on GitHub. As a pseudo-virtualization tool, it promises significant performance gains, at the same time decoupling components running in parallel and isolated from each other. If you want to join in the fun and contribute to the Docker project, however, you first need learn Go [7], the programming language in which Docker is written.

Infos

  1. "Linux Containers" by Eva-Katharina Kunst and Jürgen Quade, ADMIN, 2011, issue 06, p. 64
  2. Docker: http://docker.io
  3. "Docker" by Rob Knight, ADMIN, 2013, issue 16, p. 33
  4. "Perl: Vagrant Package" by Michael Schilli, Linux Magazine, June 2013, issue 151, p. 64, http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2013/151/Perl-Vagrant-Package
  5. Installing Docker on Ubuntu: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/ubuntulinux/
  6. Listings for this article: ftp://ftp.linux-magazin.com/pub/listings/magazine/163
  7. "Go Programming Language" by Marcus Nutzinger and Rainer Poisel, Linux Magazine, July 2010, issue 116, p. 52

The Author

Mike Schilli works as a software engineer with Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California. He can be contacted at mailto:mschilli@perlmeister.com. Mike's homepage can be found at http://perlmeister.com.

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