Docker

Docker Architecture

Linux containers (LXC) technology has taken off with Docker https://www.docker.com/ which was released as open source in March 2013. RedHat and others have collaborated with the corporate backer to the technology seemingly to compete with Canonical's JuJu https://juju.ubuntu.com/ and Charm technology which also is based on Linux containers. Linux containers are built into the linux kernel, and so offer a lightweight native method of virtualization compared to more traditional (heavyweight) virtualization techniques like VMWare, Vagrant, VirtualBox.

Essentially, the difference is the hypervisor and OS. Whereas containers are implemented with kernel features like namespaces, cgroups and chroots, a full VM requires a hypervisor plus an operating system in the VM. Docker runs a docker daemon on the Docker Host.

It is important to realize that Docker is inherently a Linux technology.

Docker Engine is an open source containerization technology for building and containerizing your applications. Docker Engine acts as a client-server application with:

• A server with a long-running daemon process dockerd.
• APIs which specify interfaces that programs can use to talk to and instruct the Docker daemon.
• A command line interface (CLI) client docker.

The CLI uses Docker APIs to control or interact with the Docker daemon through scripting or direct CLI commands. Many other Docker applications use the underlying API and CLI. The daemon creates and manage Docker objects, such as images, containers, networks, and volumes.

For more details, see Docker Architecture.

• https://docs.docker.com/develop/
• https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

Volumes and Mounts

From Data management in Docker

By default all files created inside a container are stored on a writable container layer. This means that:

The data doesn’t persist when that container no longer exists, and it can be difficult to get the data out of the container if another process needs it.

A container’s writable layer is tightly coupled to the host machine where the container is running. You can’t easily move the data somewhere else.

Writing into a container’s writable layer requires a storage driver to manage the filesystem. The storage driver provides a union filesystem, using the Linux kernel. This extra abstraction reduces performance as compared to using data volumes, which write directly to the host filesystem.

Docker has two options for containers to store files on the host machine, so that the files are persisted even after the container stops: volumes, and bind mounts.

Docker also supports containers storing files in-memory on the host machine. Such files are not persisted. If you’re running Docker on Linux, tmpfs mount is used to store files in the host’s system memory. If you’re running Docker on Windows, named pipe is used to store files in the host’s system memory.

That is all you need to know about Docker when it comes to sharing files between the host and the container.

Volumes are the preferred way to persist data in Docker containers and services.

Note: Docker Desktop is simply a fancy GUI client application that uses virtualization (a Linux Virtual Machine) to bundle the Docker Engine into your host OS.

• Volumes are the right choice when your application requires fully native file system behavior on Docker Desktop. For example, a database engine requires precise control over disk flushing to guarantee transaction durability. Volumes are stored in the Linux VM and can make these guarantees, whereas bind mounts are remoted to macOS or Windows OS, where the file systems behave slightly differently.

When you use either bind mounts or volumes, keep the following in mind:

• If you mount an empty volume into a directory in the container in which files or directories exist, these files or directories are propagated (copied) into the volume. Similarly, if you start a container and specify a volume which does not already exist, an empty volume is created for you. This is a good way to pre-populate data that another container needs.
• If you mount a bind mount or non-empty volume into a directory in the container in which some files or directories exist, these files or directories are obscured by the mount, just as if you saved files into /mnt on a Linux host and then mounted a USB drive into /mnt. The contents of /mnt would be obscured by the contents of the USB drive until the USB drive were unmounted. The obscured files are not removed or altered, but are not accessible while the bind mount or volume is mounted.

VSCode with Docker

Each time you create a Docker container, and connect VSCode to that container, VSCode installs a server into the container so that it can communicate with it. So, there is a small (a couple minutes?) delay while this happens before you can edit or do anything. Best to stop a container and only re-build it when necessary to avoid the delay.

Docker Images

Bitnami has a Docker Image for MediaWiki

is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

Application Programming Interface