[kitematic]

Connecting Kitematic to an external Docker Engine running on a Raspberry Pi

This is a guest post by Dieter Reuter, Senior Consultant at Hypriot. 

Intro and Background

At Hypriot we recently built and released our own OS image to run the Docker Engine on a low-cost Raspberry Pi and labeled it HypriotOS.  A user can download this pre-compiled Raspbian based SD card image, which includes a Linux 3.18.8 kernel with all Docker related kernel options included, and Docker 1.5.0 is already enabled with Overlay filesystem.  Just download, extract, flash to a SD card and boot your Raspberry Pi - and within minutes you have Docker up and running and you can instantly start using it.

You can read more details and find the download links in our blog post Heavily ARMed after major upgrade: Raspberry Pi with Docker 1.5.0.

As developers and geeks, we're really comfortable using SSH and a bash shell to control the Docker CLI.  It's also not a problem to connect a Linux or Mac OS X host via a native Docker CLI over the network, even a Windows client works well.  But what about the normal end users?  Wouldn't it be great to have a more convenient way to use a graphical frontend via web or a specific app.  A GUI would be really cool, but this would take a long time to develop.

Kitematic to the Rescue

Even the fact that our OS image works pretty much out of the box, and everybody can use Docker within minutes we've received a lot of feedback, whether we could build and deliver a graphical application to control Docker and deploying apps/containers with it.  And here comes Kitematic to the rescue - what a great timing.  We've just read the announcement on the Docker blog and were extremely impressed but also a little bit frustrated, it's only meant to be used on a Mac running it's own Boot2Docker VM through a newly created Docker Machine.

We were fascinated immediately about the simplicity and the seamless GUI, instantly installing Kitematic on a MacBookPro and it was running within 10 minutes only.  Really impressed and hooked!  Another 15 minutes later, we had cloned the source code repo from GitHub, then a "npm install" and a "npm start" and WOW, we're running our personal dev version!  And we even were able to create our own Mac App with a "npm run release".

Imagine now what could be even better for an end user?  What if we could use Kitematic to control a remote Docker Host running on that cute little Raspberry Pi.

Connecting the Dots

We quickly read through the docs and studied the source code and found out that Kitematic is based upon Docker Machine to control the backend Docker Host, hey cool - that's the key.  Within a couple of hours we had the first rough hack and were able to actively control a Raspberry Pi 2 running Docker 1.5.0 with a brand new graphical user interface.  Just selecting one of our favorite Docker Images from the Docker Hub and pushed it seamlessly to a RPi!  

But until now, it was just a hack and far away from being used in production or by end users.  All settings were done with some source code changes within Kitematic itself.

Here are the details of that quick hack.  You only have to change these three lines in `src/Docker.js`:

javascript 16:      protocol: 'http', 17:      host: 192.168.2.114, 18:      port: 2375,

Just use an unencrypted connection for the first step, change the protocol from `https` to `http`, use the IP address of the Raspberry Pi, and don't forget to change the port number to `2375`.  With the last change, Kitematic don't use any cert or key file to connect to the remote Docker Host.

For the next day we scheduled a short online meeting with Mike from Kitematic, and to our surprise the whole team joined us, including Jeff and Sean.  Everybody was so happy and surprised how easy we could merge both ideas and concepts together.  Right now, we're able to offer a Docker optimized OS for the Raspberry Pi which one could install and use within a few minutes only, and within the same amount of time, installing the app from Kitematic to control your Raspberry Pi with a great user experience.

Switch to a better System Design

Thanks to the fact, that Kitematic uses Docker Machine under the hood to connect to it's Docker VM, it must be able to use this concept for a better system design to communicate with an external Docker Host.  Our first try was just looking for a standard driver available which supports our needs.  We quickly tested the `none` driver and were able to control the Raspberry Pi from within Docker Machine.  For this case it was necessary to reconfigure Docker to use a TLS encrypted connection.  But we had absolute no luck to get it work together with Kitematic. 

Ok, let's dig deeper and just use the Docker Machine GitHub repo to get familiar with the driver concept.  And learn what has to be done, to build your own Docker Machine Driver specifically for connecting a Docker Engine running on an external Linux machine.  Within a day only, we got it working, our very first driver implementation for Docker Machine.  Our goal was to keep it super-simple and ready-to-use together with Kitematic, and hopefully don't change anything within the app's source code.  

All changes are already documented in a few pull-requests which are available for further improvement and testing.

hypriot/kitematic#1, Connect to externel docker host through docker-machine

hypriot/machine#1, Add driver 'hypriot'

To use this improved Kitematic version from Hypriot, you have to clone the GitHub repo hypriot/kitematic, use the branch `connect-to-externel-docker-host` and build it with "npm run install", it will also download and use our specifically built version of Docker Machine with the `hypriot` driver included.

Mission accomplished

At the end, we've now built our own basic Docker Machine driver for the HypriotOS to use it for controlling a Raspberry Pi with the Kitematic app, and we'll improve it over the next few days and weeks to get it production ready.  To our surprise, we only had to change a single line of code within Kitematic itself.  

Here is a short 4 minute screencast to demonstrate the running system as Docker Kitematic controls Raspberry Pi 2 running Docker 1.5.0.

And the best thing is, it could be used to connect any other external Docker Host to Kitematic, not only the Raspberry Pi.  In the PR we included a short description how to connect an already running Boot2Docker VM to Kitematic. And if anyone is interested to help, please feel free to join.  As soon as we're done with the development we'll create an upstream PR to get the changes back into Kitematic and Docker Machine.

Next Steps

We do have a lot of things on our roadmap, maybe too much to share in this blog post.  Here are at least the next important things we're planning:

new Linux kernel 3.18.9

support for Open vSwitch (we'd love to use SocketPlane on the RPi)

include kernel options for Open vSwitch

natively compiled packages for Open vSwitch

support for Docker Machine

production ready driver for HypriotOS and the Raspberry Pi

support for Docker Compose

support for Docker Swarm

... (depending on user feedback)

Send us your Feedback, please!

We really love feedback and would like to get some new ideas and thoughts from all of you.  So, if you're liking our ideas and the way to find and break the limits, please send us your comments via email, twitter or drop us a line.  We'd be more than happy to answer and talk directly to share our experiences.

This is a guest post by Dieter Reuter, Senior Consultant at Hypriot. You can contact Dieter and his team via Twitter or email:

Dieter Reuter, @Quintus23M, [email protected]

The Hypriot Team, @HypriotTweets, http://blog.hypriot.com

[kitematic]

Our one click upgrade from dorm room to Docker - the Kitematic story

If you didn’t already know, Kitematic is the fastest and the easiest way to use Docker on your Mac  We are super excited to announce Kitematic is going to be part of Docker family.  We get to work alongside the team of developers that inspired us to start a company together.  Together we will continue our mission to build easy-to-use yet powerful open source developer products at Docker.

If you haven’t tried Kitematic yet, download it here. 

So why did we join Docker? The answer to that question can be found in the Kitematic story.

The Itch We Had to Scratch

It all began in our student apartment (ok - so it wasn’t a dorm room, but close enough).

After going through a number of different internships while studying engineering at the University of Waterloo, we collectively came away with a sense that there fundamentally needed to be better tools for developers and we wanted to create one. Modern web applications are inherently complex. Think of them like modern cities. They are living systems of many services, like transportation, roads and utilities that need to work together in harmony. The infrastructure to make this happen is either too cumbersome and distracting for the average developer or remained proprietary within companies. We wanted to change that.

So we made a prototype video of an online cloud development service that would synchronize code between a cloud environment and the desktop. To gauge interest, we posted the video on Hacker News. Within 24 hours, we had over 700 developers wanting to sign-up for the service. That was super exciting!

Being students, we didn’t have any budget to run such a service, so we searched for student grants. We found out both the University of Waterloo and the Government of Canada offered grants for students building technology startups. We decided to try our luck, and pitched both organizations about the idea. They believed in us, and were willing to hand us equity-free grants to get us started.

The result was Kite, which we began building in the summer of 2013, and launched a beta in October. Its purpose was to give new software developers an easy to use cloud environment to work on - that starts in one click. Within a week of launching, we had over 1,000 users trying it out and that momentum continued over the next four months with lots of positive feedback from our users. Things were going well until we realized that our costs per user were growing near linearly, and that the business model wasn’t going to be profitable even if we continued growth. We needed to make changes to our business model immediately.

With that realization, we quickly returned to the  “whiteboard” to see what changes we could make or to come up with a different plan. It was at that point we reflected on some of the core principles and tools that has inspired us and all thoughts pointed to Docker, which we had been using since v0.3 to run our service.  We had the idea to take Kite and apply it to Docker to build a product that makes Docker super easy to use. Then we could enable more developers to get started with Docker and ultimately creating scalable, micro-services applications. To validate this idea, we messaged many Docker users online, and set up meetings to learn about their Docker experience. Some users experienced hiccups in getting Docker setup before they could start using it. They wanted an installer to set up Docker, and a visual interface to manage it. And just like Docker did from dotCloud, we embarked on our own pivot.

The result was Kitematic. It automatically sets up everything you need to run Docker on your Mac and provides a GUI to easily run and manage Docker containers. Many developers out there already use GUIs and IDEs (e.g. Java or .NET).  We believe bringing a GUI experience to Docker will make it appeal to these developers and many others.  Since launching late 2014, we’ve received over 2,000 stars on our GitHub repository, and supportive comments from our users - YOU!

When we were approached by Docker to bring Kitematic into the project, we were thrilled.  Now that you know our journey, it makes total sense for us to try to make the Kitematic experience a core part of the Docker experience.  We want to make Docker accessible to many more developers.  By joining the Docker team, the Kitematic project also gains from the combined experience of the Docker engineering team, community and ecosystem.

Now, it’s time to say that we will be upping the game once more by joining what has powered us since the beginning - Docker. Together we’ll be making your experience with Docker simpler and even more powerful.

Best of all, Kitematic will remain open source, and we will continue to maintain it. If you’d like to help please check out our roadmap on GitHub, and see how you can contribute.

I’d like to say THANK YOU to all of our users and everyone who’s helped us along the way. We wouldn’t be here without you!

Thank you,

Mike, Jeff, Sean

[kitematic]

Kitematic 0.4 Released

Today we are launching Kitematic 0.4 with automatic updates, full compatibility with Boot2Docker, and we've addressed a number of stability and installer issues. 

Download Kitematic 0.4

Always be up-to-date!  We've added an auto-updater to always keep you on the latest and greatest version of Kitematic. The updater works in the background, so you're never distracted from your work.

Easily Accessible Container Ports Working on projects that require access to ports? We've built it in our workflow, so you don't have to dig through settings to find the port(s) of a particular container. 

Full Boot2Docker Compatibility  You can now easily switch between CLI and GUI. Kitematic supports official installation of Boot2Docker for a smoother Docker experience on the desktop.

...and lots more! 

Installer bug fixes / UI improvements

Improved Kitematic performance

and more general improvements. 

Download Kitematic 0.4