Category: docker

Dockerized toolchain in CLion with Conan

In the olden times it was relatively hard to develop C++ projects cross-platform. You had to deal with cross-compiling, different compilers and versions of them, implementation-defined and unspecified behaviour, build system issues and lacking dependency management.

Recent compilers mitigated many problems and tools like CMAKE and Conan really helped with build issues and dependencies. Nevertheless, C++ – its compilers and their output – is platform-dependent and thus platform differences still exist and shine through. But with the advent of containerization and many development tools supporting “dev containers” or “dockerized toolchains” this also became much easier and feasible.

CLion’s dockerized toolchain

CLions dockerized toolchain is really easy to setup. After that you can build and run your application on the platform of your choice, e.g. a Debian container running your IDE on a Windows machine. This is all fine and easy for a simple CMake-based hello-world project.

In real projects there are some pitfalls and additional steps to do to make it work seamlessly with Conan as your dependency manager.

Expanding the simple case to dependencies with Conan

First of all your container needs to be able to run Conan. Here is a simple Dockerfile that helps getting started:

FROM debian:bookworm AS toolchain

RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y install \
  cmake \
  debhelper \
  ninja-build \
  pipx \
  git \
  lsb-release \
  python3 \
  python3-dev \
  pkg-config \
  gdb

RUN PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin pipx install conan

# This allows us to automatically use the conan context from our dockerized toolchain that we populated on the development
# machine
ENV CONAN_HOME=/tmp/my-project/.conan2

The important thing here is that you set CONAN_HOME to the directory CLion uses to mount your project. By default CLion will mount your project root directory to /tmp/<project_name> into the dev container.

If you have some dependencies you need to build/export yourself, you have to run the conan commands using your container image with a bind mount so that the conan artifacts reside on your host machine because CLion tends to use short-lived containers for the toolchain. So we create a build_dependencies.sh script

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Clone and export conan-omniorb
rm -rf conan-omniorb
git clone -b conan2/4.2.3 https://github.com/softwareschneiderei/conan-omniorb.git
conan export ./conan-omniorb

# Clone and export conan-cpptango
rm -rf conan-cpptango
git clone -b conan2/9.3.6 https://github.com/softwareschneiderei/conan-cpptango.git
conan export ./conan-cpptango

and put it in the docker command:

CMD chmod +x build_environment.sh && ./build_environment.sh

Now we can run the container to setup our Conan context once using a bind-mount like -v C:\repositories\my-project\.conan2:/tmp/my-project/.conan2.

If you have done everything correctly, especially the correct locations for the Conan artifacts you can use your dockerized toolchain and develop transparently regardless of host and target platforms.

I hope this helps someone fighting multiplatform development using C++ and Conan with CLion.

Nginx upload limit

Today, I encountered a surprising issue with my Docker-based web application. The application has an upload limit set, but before reaching it, an unexpected error appeared:

413 Request Entity Too Large

Despite the application’s upload limit being correctly configured, the error occurred much earlier—when the file was barely over 1MB. Where does this limitation come from, and how can it be changed?


Troubleshooting

The issue occurred before the request even reached the application layer, during a critical step in request processing. The root cause was Nginx, the web server and reverse proxy used in the Docker stack.

Nginx, commonly used in modern application stacks for load balancing, caching, and HTTPS handling, acts as the gateway to the application, managing all incoming requests. However, Nginx was rejecting uploads larger than 1MB. This was due to the client_max_body_size directive, which—when unset—defaults to a relatively low limit in some configurations. As a result, Nginx blocked larger file uploads before they could reach the application.

Solution

To resolve this issue, the client_max_body_size directive in the Nginx configuration needed to be updated to allow larger file uploads.

Modify the nginx.conf file or the relevant server block configuration:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    client_max_body_size 100M;  # Allow uploads up to 100MB
}

After making this change, restart Nginx to apply the new configuration:

nginx -s reload

If Nginx is running in a Docker container, you can restart the container instead:

docker restart <container_name>

With this update, the upload limit increased to 100MB, allowing the application to handle larger files without premature rejection. Once the configuration was applied, the error disappeared, and file uploads worked as expected, provided they remained within the newly defined limits.

A Tale of Hidden Variables

Today was one of those frustrating moments that every developer encounters at some point. We were working on a Docker Compose setup and observed behavior that could only happen if a specific environment variable had been set. To ensure that this environment variable wasn’t being set I scoured through the Docker Compose file, checked the local environment variables using the export command, and grepped all the relevant files in the project directory. But no matter what I did, this environment variable was still haunting us, wreaking havoc on the setup.

After what felt like an eternity of troubleshooting, we finally uncovered the culprit: an old, hidden .env file left over from a long-forgotten configuration. This file had been silently setting the environment variable I was desperately trying to eliminate.

Here’s how it all unfolded and what I learned from the experience:

When I first suspected that the environment variable might be lurking somewhere in the project, my instinct was to use grep to search for it in all the files within my local directory. I ran something along the lines of:

grep -r 'MY_ENV_VAR' *

To my surprise, nothing relevant showed up. I had expected this command to search through everything in my local directory. However, I had forgotten one important detail: grep doesn’t search hidden files by default when you use *.

Since .env files are typically hidden (starting with a dot), grep completely skipped over them. Little did I know, that old .env file was sitting quietly in the background, setting the environment variable that was causing all my issues.

After some frustration, my colleague finally had the realization that there might be hidden files at play. In Unix-like operating systems, files that start with a dot (.), like .env, are treated as hidden and are not listed or searched by default with common commands. Just as hidden variables in physics could influence particles without being directly observable, the hidden .env file was affecting my environment variables without being immediately visible.

To include hidden files in your search, you need to modify the grep command to look for them explicitly:

grep -r 'MY_ENV_VAR' . --include=".*"

This experience led me to reflect on whether deployment-relevant files like .env should be hidden in the first place, since they can easily be overlooked during debugging. It also makes them more prone to being forgotten. Hidden files are easy to miss when troubleshooting, especially when you’re under pressure.

Given that .env files can have a significant impact on the behavior of applications, containerized setups, and CI/CD pipelines, making them hidden by default might not always be the best approach. After all, if an environment variable has the power to alter how an entire application runs, it’s something we want to be highly visible and readily accessible.

In the end, this experience taught me two important lessons:

Always search for hidden files when troubleshooting issues related to environment variables. If your Docker Compose or other environment-dependent setups aren’t behaving as expected, don’t forget to check for hidden .env files.

Consider the visibility of critical configuration files. Should .env files be hidden by default, or should they be treated as first-class citizens in our directory structures? In many cases, keeping them visible might help avoid unexpected behavior and wasted hours of debugging.

Converting a Grails app from war deployment in Tomcat to docker

A few years ago we had real servers with servlet containers installed and managed by administrators. These machines were bare-metal unicorns and had to be kept alive as long as possible (for many years). With the advent of first virtual machines and then container runtimes like Docker the approach and responsibilities for hosting web applications changed.

Our application not only went from Grails framework version 1 to 5 (atm, and soon to version 6) but also the above voyage regarding the hosting environment.

While the step from bare-metal to virtual machine was negligible from the developer and application side the migration to docker-based hosting is quite a step. Therefore I would like to depict the biggest changes of running a Grails application as a WAR deployment in Tomcat to a standalone application in Docker.

The original setting

We had our Grails application running on a server with a Tomcat servlet container for years. On the server we had also an ElasticSearch instance running and saved documents in a few well-defined directories on the local file system. Our database (Oracle in the past, PostgreSQL for over a year now) was running managed in a data center. We used container features like JNDI for parts of the configuration and datasources.

Deployment was essentially uploading a new WAR and context.xml file to the Tomcat servlet container using an Ansible playbook (where we restarted the servlet container to ensure not leaving any resource leaks…).

This setup worked quite well for years, only upgrades of the host operating system along with Tomcat and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) updates meant some work.

The target setup

Our customer has been in the process of converting most of the services running on virtual machines to dockerized deployments managed using Portainer. Most of the provisioning is automated and there is almost no snow flaking of the virtual machines hosting the docker runtimes. This eases the operation and administration of the services a lot and makes it much easier to setup new instances of a service and to monitor them.

So it was our task to migrate our setup on the the host VM to a docker-based deployment. In the future we basically push a docker image of our application to a docker registry of the customer and update the stack using Portainer.

The journey to a dockerized Grails app

The first thing to do were some changes to build.gradle to build a Jar-application instead of a WAR archive. We decided it was easier and more lightweight to run the Grails app standalone with the embedded tomcat than to use Tomcat in a docker container:

  • Remove the gradle war plugin
  • Change providedCompile dependencies to implementation
  • Add a task to prepare the Dockerfile and context to build our bootable application image:
task prepareDocker(type: Copy, dependsOn: assemble) {
    description = 'Copy files from src/main/docker and application jar to Docker temporal build directory'
    group = 'Docker'

    from 'src/main/docker'
    from project.bootJar

    into dockerBuildDir
}
  • Add an appropiate Dockerfile to our docker context in src/main/docker:
FROM eclipse-temurin:11-jdk-jammy
MAINTAINER Mihael Koep "mihael.koep@softwareschneiderei.de"

EXPOSE 8080

WORKDIR /app
COPY naomi-boot.jar .

ENV GRAILS_ENV development
# Additional env variables for configuration

CMD java -Dgrails.env=$GRAILS_ENV -jar /app/application-boot.jar
  • Remove JNDI usages and convert configuration from context.xml and JNDI to environment variables
  • Add a docker-compose.yml for the stack definition (here outlined for development with a database as part of the stack)
version: '3.7'
services:
  my-app:
    container_name: my-app-application
    image: ${IMAGE_TAG}
    environment:
      - GRAILS_ENV=development
      - DB_URL=jdbc:postgresql://my-app-db:5432/my-app
    volumes:
      - my-appdata:/app/data_home
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    depends_on:
      - my-app-db
      - my-app-elastic
  my-app-db:
    container_name: my-app-database-stack
    image: postgres:13
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=my-app
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=my-db-password
      - POSTGRES_DB=my-app
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
  my-app-elastic:
    container_name: my-app-elastic-stack
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.8.0
    environment:
      - node.name=es01
      - cluster.name=my-app-es
      - discovery.type=single-node
      - bootstrap.memory_lock=true
      - "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
    ulimits:
      memlock:
        soft: -1
        hard: -1
    volumes:
      - searchdata:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
    ports:
      - 9200:9200
      - 9300:9300
volumes:
  searchdata:
  my-appdata:

Conclusion

The journey from classical deployments to a dockerized environment using a docker stack is not that long for a Grails application (or most other Java web applications). It makes it trivial setting up a new instance or migrating it to another host as most configuration is in version controlled files and there is next to none snowflaking. The customer has an easier time running the web application because the requirements are only a container-runtime and explicitly formulated in the stack definition.

In addition, the developers are free to choose the JVM and other details within the containers without having to cross-check with the administrators of the customer if they are supported by their organization.

Using Docker Containers in Development with WebStorm: Next Iteration

We are always in pursue of improving our build and development infrastructures. Who isn’t?

At Softwareschneiderei, we have about five times as many projects than we have developers (without being overworked, by the way) and each of that comes with its own requirements, so it is important to be able to switch between different projects as easily as cloning a git repository, avoiding meticulous configuration of your development machines that might break on any change.

This is the main advantage of the development container (DevContainer) approach (with Docker being the major contestant at the moment), and last November, I tried to outline my then-current understanding of integrating such an approach with the JetBrains IDEs. E.g. for WebStorm, there is some kind of support for dockerized run configurations, but that does some weird stuff (see below), and JetBrains did not care enough yet to make that configurable, or at least to communicate the sense behind that.

Preparing our Dev Container

In our projects, we usually have at least two Docker build stages:

  • one to prepare the build platform (this will be used for the DevContainer)
  • one to execute the build itself (only this stage copies actual sources)

There might be more (e.g. for running the build in production, or for further dependencies), but the basic distinction above helps us to speed up the development process already. (Further reading: Docker cache management)

For one of our current React projects (in which I chose to try Vite in favor of the outdated Create-React-App, see also here), the Dockerfile might look like

# --------------------------------------------
FROM node:18-bullseye AS build-platform

WORKDIR /opt
COPY package.json .
COPY package-lock.json .

# see comment below
RUN npm install -g vite

RUN npm ci --ignore-scripts
WORKDIR /opt/project

# --------------------------------------------
FROM build-platform AS build-stage

RUN mkdir -p /build/result
COPY . .
CMD npm run build && mv dist /build/result/app

The “build platform” stage can then be used as our Dev Container, from the command line as (assuming, this Dockerfile resides inside your project directory where also src/ etc. are chilling)

docker build -t build-platform-image --target build-platform .
docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/opt/project <command_for_starting_dev_server>

Some comments:

  • The RUN step to npm install -g vite is required for a Vite project because the our chosen base image node:18-bullseye does not know about the vite binaries. One could improve that by adding another step beforehand, only preparing a vite+node base image and taking advantage of Docker caching from then on.
  • We specifically have to take the WORKDIR /opt/project because our mission statement is to integrate the whole thing with WebStorm. If you are not interested in that, that path is for you to choose.

Now, if we are not working against any idiosyncrasies of an IDE, the preparation step “npm ci” gives us all our node dependencies in the current directory inside a node_modules/ folder. Because this blog post is going somewhere, already now we chose to place that node_modules in the parent folder of the actual WORKDIR. This will work because for lack of an own node_modules, node will find it above (this fact might change with future Node versions, but for now it holds true).

The Challenge with JetBrains

Now, the current JetBrains IDEs allow you to run your project with the node interpreter (containerized within the node-platform image) in the “Run/Debug Configurations” window via

“+” ➔ “npm” ➔ Node interpreter “Add…” ➔ “Add Remote” ➔ “Docker”

then choose the right image (e.g. build-platform-image:latest).

Now enters that strange IDE behaviour that is not really documented or changeable anywhere. If you run this configuration, your current project directory is going to be mounted in two places inside the container:

  • /opt/project
  • /tmp/<temporary UUID>

This mounting behaviour explains why we cannot install our node_modules dependencies inside the container in the /opt/project path – mounting external folders always override anything that might exist in the corresponding mount points, e.g. any /opt/project/node_modules will be overwritten by force.

As we cared about that by using the /opt parent folder for the node_modules installation, and we set the WORKDIR to be /opt/project one could think that now we can just call the development server (written as <command_for_starting_dev_server> above).

But we couldn’t!

For reasons that made us question our reality way longer than it made us happy, it turned out that the IDE somehow always chose the /tmp/<uuid> path as WORKDIR. We found no way of changing that. JetBrains doesn’t tell us anything about it. the “docker run -w / --workdir” parameter did not help. We really had to use that less-than-optimal hack to modify the package.json “scripts” options, by

 "scripts": {
    "dev": "vite serve",
    "dev-docker": "cd /opt/project && vite serve",
    ...
  },

The “dev” line was there already (if you use create-react-app or something else , this calls that something else accordingly). We added another script with an explicit “cd /opt/project“. One can then select that script in the new Run Configuration from above and now that really works.

We do not like this way because doing so, one couples a bad IDE behaviour with hard coded paths inside our source files – but at least we separate it enough from our other code that it doesn’t destroy anything – e.g. in principle, you could still run this thing with npm locally (after running “npm install” on your machine etc.)

Side note: Dealing with the “@esbuild/linux-x64” error

The internet has not widely adopteds Vite as a scaffolding / build tool for React projects yet and one of the problems on our way was a nasty error of the likes

Error: The package "esbuild-linux-64" could not be found, and is needed by esbuild

We found the best solution for that problem was to add the following to the package.json:

"optionalDependencies": {
    "@esbuild/linux-x64": "0.17.6"
}

… using the “optionalDependencies” rather than the other dependency entries because this way, we still allow the local installation on a Windows machine. If the dependency was not optional, npm install would just throw an wrong-OS-error.

(Note that as a rule, we do not like the default usage of SemVer ^ or ~ inside the package.json – we rather pin every dependency, and do our updates specifically when we know we are paying attention. That makes us less vulnerable to sudden npm-hacks or sneaky surprises in general.)

I hope, all this information might be useful to you. It took us a considerable amount of thought and research to come to this conclusion, so if you have any further tips or insights, I’d be glad to hear from you!

Create custom jre in Docker

I recently wrote a Java application and wanted to run it in a Docker container. Unfortunately, my program needs a module from the Java jdk, which is why I can’t run it in the standard jre. When I run the program with the jdk, everything works but I have much more than I actually need and a 390MB docker container.

That’s why I set out to build my own jre, cut-down exactly to my application needs.

For this I found two Gradle plugins that help me. Jdeps checks the dependencies of an application and can summarise them in a file. This file can be used as input for the Jlink plugin. Jlink builds its own jre from it.

In the following I will present a way to build a custom jre with gradle and the two plugins in a multistage dockerfile and run an application in it.

Configuration in Gradle

First we need to do some configuration in gradle.build file. To use jdeps, the application must be packaged as an executable jar file and all dependencies must be copied in a seperate folder . First we create a task that copies all current dependencies to folder named lib. For the jar, we need to define the main class and set the class path to search for all dependencies in the lib folder.

// copies all the jar dependencies of your app to the lib folder
task copyDependencies(type: Copy) {
    from configurations.runtimeClasspath
    into "$buildDir/lib"
}

jar {
    manifest {
        attributes["Main-Class"] = "Main"
        attributes["Class-Path"] = configurations.runtimeClasspath
            .collect{'lib/'+it.getName()}.join(' ')
    }
}

Docker Image

Now we can get to work on the Docker image.

As a first step, we build our jre in a Java jdk. To do this, we run the CopyDependencies task we just created and build the Java application with gradle. Then we let jdeps collect all dependencies from the lib folder.
The output is written to the file jre-deps.info. It is therefore important that no errors or warnings are output, which is set with the -q parameter. The print-module-deps is crucial so that the dependencies are output and saved in the file.

The file is now passed to jlink and a custom-fit jre for the application is built from it. The parameters set in the call also reduce the size. The settings can be read in detail in the plugin documentation linked above.

FROM eclipse-temurin:17-jdk-alpine AS jre-build

COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app

RUN chmod u+x gradlew; ./gradlew copyDependencies; ./gradlew build

# find JDK dependencies dynamically from jar
RUN jdeps \
--ignore-missing-deps \
-q \
--multi-release 17 \
--print-module-deps \
--class-path build/lib/* \
build/libs/app-*.jar > jre-deps.info

RUN jlink \
--compress 2 \
--strip-java-debug-attributes \
--no-header-files \
--no-man-pages \
--output jre \
--add-modules $(cat jre-deps.info)

FROM alpine:3.17.0
WORKDIR /deployment

# copy the custom JRE produced from jlink
COPY --from=jre-build /app/jre jre
# copy the app dependencies
COPY --from=jre-build /app/build/lib/* lib/
# copy the app
COPY --from=jre-build /app/build/libs/app-*.jar app.jar

# run in user context
RUN useradd schneide
RUN chown schneide:schneide .
USER schneide

# run the app on startup
CMD jre/bin/java -jar app.jar

In the second Docker stage, a smaller image is used and only the created jre, the dependencies and the app.jar are copied into it. The app is then executed with the jre.

In my case, I was able to reduce the Docker container size to 110 MB with the alpine image, which is less than a third. Or, using a ubuntu:jammy image, to 182 MB, which is also more than half.

Using custom Docker containers for development with WebStorm & Co.

Docker has become one of the go-to tools of many developers these days. Not because any project should implement as many technological buzz words per se, but due to their great deal of flexibility compared with their small hassle of setup.

For stuff like node-based applications, using a Dev Container is useful because in principle, you do not need to have any of the npm stuff on your actual machine – not only you avoid having these monstrous node_modules folders, but also avoid having accidental dependencies on some specific configuration that might hold true on your device, but not generally.

For some of these reasons probably, JetBrains included Docker Dev Containers as a kind of “remote” development. In a sense, a docker container can be thought of as a remote machine, regardless of the fact that it shares your local hardware and is just a software abstraction.

In my opinion, JetBrains usually does great software, but there is some weird behaviour in their usage of Docker Dev Containers and it took us a while to find a quite general and IDE-independent solution; I’ll just use WebStorm as an example of something that appeared unusually hard to tame. I guess it will become better eventually.

For now, one might think of using the built-in config like:

  1. New Run Configuration -> npm
  2. Node Interpreter: “…”
  3. “+” -> Add Remote… -> “Docker”
  4. Use an image of your choice, either one of the node base images or a custom one (see below) with its corresponding tag

Now for reasons that seem to be completely undocumented and unavoidable (tell me if you know more!), the IDE forces you to then mount your project to /opt/project inside this container, where it gets mirrored during runtime to somewhere /tmp/<temporary uuid>/ – and in several of our projects (due to our folder structure which is not even particularly abnormal) this made this option to be completely unusable.

The way one can work without these strange idiosyncrasies is as follows:

First, create a Dockerfile in which you do all the required setup. It might be an optional idea to set the user, away from “root” to something more restricted like “node” (even though in development, you probably have your eyes on everything nevertheless). You can do more custom setup here. This can look like

FROM node:16.18.0-bullseye-slim

WORKDIR /your-home-inside-container
RUN chown node .

COPY package.json package-lock.json /your-home-inside-container

USER node

RUN npm ci --ignore-scripts

# COPY <whatever you might want> <where you want it inside>

EXPOSE 3000

CMD npm start

From that Dockerfile, build a local image in the same folder like:

# you might need -f if the Dockerfile is not named "Dockerfile"
docker build -t your-dev-image .

Then, create a new Run Configuration but choose “Shell script” (not npm)

docker run -it --rm --entrypoint= -v ${PWD}/src:/your-home-inside-container/src -p 0.0.0.0:3000:3000 your-dev-image

You might use a different “-p” port forwarding if you do not want to have your development server broadcasting on port 3000 (another advantage of Dev Containers, you can easily run multiple instances on different ports).

This is about the whole magic. But there are two further things that could be important here:

Hot Reloading (live updating whenever source files change)

This is done rather easily, however seems to change once in a while. We figured out that at least if you are using react-scripts@5.0.1 (which is what “npm start” addresses, unless you do that differently), you just need to set the environment variable “WATCHPACK_POLLING=true”. I.e put that in your Dockerfile a

ENV WATCHPACK_POLLING true

or pass it into your docker run ... -e WATCHPACK_POLLING=true ... your-dev-image line

Routing a development proxy to some “local host”

If your software e.g. adresses a backend that is running on your development machine or another Docker Dev Container, it can not just access that host from inside the Docker container. Neither is the port forwarding via “-p …:…” of any use, because that addresses the other direction – i.e. what port from the container is exposed to outside access – here, we go the other direction.

When the software inside the container would actually want to address “localhost”, it needs to be directed at the host under which your local machine appears. Docker has a special hostname for that and it is host.docker.internal

I.e. if your local backend is running on “localhost:8080” on your machine, you need to tell your Dev Container to direct its requests to “host.docker.internal:8080”.

In one of our projects, we needed some specific control over the proxy that the React development server gives you and here is way to gain that control – add a “setupProxy.js” inside your src/ folder and put in it something like

const { createProxyMiddleware } = require('http-proxy-middleware');

module.exports = function(app) {
    if (process.env.LOCAL_DEVELOPMENT) {
        return;
    }

    let httpProxyMiddleware = createProxyMiddleware({
        target: process.env.REACT_APP_PROXY || 'http://localhost:8080',
        changeOrigin: true,
    });
    app.use('/api', httpProxyMiddleware); // change to your needs accordingly
};

This way, one can always change the address via setting a REACT_APP_PROXY environment variable as in the step above; and one can also disable the whole proxying by setting the LOCAL_DEVELOPMENT env variable to true. Name these as you like, and you can even extend this setupProxy to include web sockets or different proxies for different routes, if you have any questions on that, just comment below 🙂

Docker Interpreter with Environment Variables in RubyMine

As you know from previous blog entries, we now rely on Docker dev containers as interpreters for our IDEs. This has the advantage that we don’t need local installations of for example Ruby or single packages, but all requirements are in a Docker container and our machine stays clean.
RubyMine has some pitfalls for this way. So in this blog post, I’ll present you some hard-won insights and show you what solution we came to.

Those were our first problems:

  1. When using a single Docker image as an interpreter, it does not clean up everything when exiting the application and container. For example, the Server.pids file remains on the local machine, resulting in the following error: “A server is already running. Check path/Pids/Server.pids.” This behavior can be worked around with a Before Launch script that deletes the file when the application starts, but it’s not very nice. RubyMine unfortunately does not have Docker Container Settings, different to other Jetbrain IDEs, so a simple –rm does not work.
  2. Furthermore, we need to talk to our local machine from our Docker container, for example to access a DB or to use a VPN tunnel originating from the local machine. For this, the Docker container needs to know my IP address, or the respective IP address of each developer. In our version control system, however, we don’t want to constantly overwrite the IP addresses or check before each push that you don’t accidentally write up your own IP address. Our wish was to have a local environment variable MY_MACHINE_IP where each developer writes their IP address and the Docker container fetches it when the program starts. The normal integration of the system environment variables by simply checking this option unfortunately does not work here when we start the program in Docker. This is because the IDE then integrates the environment variables of the Docker container and not those of my local machine. Also, using a local environment variable to pass it to Docker doesn’t work in Run Configuration, nor in Docker Image creation, as the images below show. Same if you want to use PATH variables of the IDE instead of environment variables.
Environment Settings in Run Configuration
Environments in Dev Container

Our solution – Docker Compose:

Our first problem is solved by using docker compose directly. The problem with the Server.pid does not occur, because RubyMine manages the Docker Compose better and removes the Server.pid automatically at startup.

Below, I explain our setup of a Docker Compose as an interpreter and how it solved all the problems.

We created a simple Docker Compose yaml with the image we want to use as an interpreter. At this point, you can also define environment variables that use local environment variables of your local machine. This solves our second problem.

Docker Compose yaml

The definition of the volume is important at this point. Docker tries to store things there during the installation and throws an internal server error if the volume is missing: 
Error response from daemon: the working directory ‘C:\repositories\my-project’ is invalid, it needs to be an absolute path.

Now an interpreter can be set up in RubyMine. To do this, a new remote interpreter must be created in the Settings under Language & Frameworks: Ruby SDK and Gems. An example is shown in the figure below:

Ruby Docker Compose Interpreter

It is important here to select the interpreter after this, otherwise you will not be able to save and will get an error that the project has no interpreter.

Now the interpreter can be stored in the run configuration.

Recap:

We are now able to run our Ruby environment in a Docker container. Thus, the environment is independent of the local circumstances such as the installed Ruby version or packages, as these can all be found in the container. Also, each programmer can run the project locally without any further adjustments via a defined environment variable and the Docker container can still talk to other local Docker containers on the machine. Thus, the status in Gitlab is generally valid and not bound to the respective programmer by a customizable IP or the like.

The layer cake approach: Docker multi-stage builds and Dev containers

One recent feature that has the ability to change the way developers work on their local machines are dev containers. In short, a dev container is a docker container that provides a working environment for a specific project and can be used by the IDE to develop the project without ever installing anything on the developer machine except the IDE, docker and git. It is especially interesting if you switch between projects with different ecosystems or the same ecosystem in different version often.

Most modern IDEs support dev containers, even if it still feels a bit unpolished in some implementations. In my opinion, the advantages of dev containers outweigh the additional complexity. The main advantage is the guarantee that all development systems are set up correctly and in sync. Our instructions to set up projects shrank from a lengthy wiki page to four bullet points that are essentially the same process for all projects.

But one question needs to be answered: If you have a docker-based build and perhaps even a docker-based delivery and operation, how do you keep their Dockerfiles in sync with your dev container Dockerfile?

My answer is to not split the project’s Dockerfiles, but layer them in one file as a multi-stage build. Let’s view the (rather simple) Dockerfile of one small project:

# --------------------------------------------
FROM python:3.10-alpine AS project-python-platform

COPY requirements.txt requirements.txt
RUN pip3 install --upgrade pip
RUN pip3 install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

# --------------------------------------------
FROM project-python-platform AS project-application

WORKDIR /app

# ----------------------
# Environment
# ----------------------
ENV FLASK_APP=app
# ----------------------

COPY . .

CMD python -u app.py

The interesting part is introduced by the horizontal dividers: The Dockerfile is separated into two parts, the first one called “project-python-platform” and the second one “project-application”.

The first build target contains everything that is needed to form the development environment (python and the project’s requirements). If you build an image from just the first build target, you get your dev container’s image:

docker build --pull --target project-python-platform -t dev-container .

The second build target uses the dev container image as a starting point and includes the project artifacts to provide an operations image. You can push this image into production and be sure that your development effort and your production experience are based on the same platform.

If you frowned because of the “COPY . .” line, we make use of the .dockerignore feature for small projects.

Combining multi-stage builds with dev containers keeps all stages of your delivery pipeline in sync, even the zeroth stage – the developer’s machine.

But what if you have a more complex scenario than just a python project? Let’s look at the Dockerfile of a python project with a included javascript/node/react sub-project:

# --------------------------------------------
FROM python:3.9-alpine AS chronos-python-platform

COPY requirements.txt requirements.txt

RUN pip3 install --upgrade pip
RUN pip3 install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

# --------------------------------------------
FROM node:16-bullseye AS chronos-node-platform

COPY chronos_client/package.json .
COPY chronos_client/package-lock.json .

RUN npm -v
RUN npm ci --ignore-scripts

# --------------------------------------------
FROM chronos-node-platform AS chronos-react-builder

COPY chronos_client .

# build the client javascript application
RUN npm run build

# --------------------------------------------
FROM chronos-python-platform AS chronos-application

WORKDIR /app

COPY . .

# set environment variables
ENV ZEITGEIST_PASSWORT=''

COPY --from=chronos-react-builder /build ./chronos_client/build

CMD python -u chronos.py

It is the same approach, just more layers on the cake, four in this example. There is one small caveat: If you want to build the “chronos-node-platform”, the preceding “chronos-python-platform” gets built, too. That delays things a bit, but only once in a while.

The second to last line might be interesting if you aren’t familiar with multi-stage builds: The copy command takes compiled files from the third stage/layer and puts them in the final layer that is the operations image. This ensures that the compiler is left behind in the delivery pipeline and only the artifacts are published.

I’m sure that this layer cake approach is not feasible for all project setups. It works for us for small and medium projects without too much polyglot complexity. The best aspect is that it separates project-specific knowledge from approach knowledge. The project-specific things get encoded in the Dockerfile, the approach knowledge is the same for all projects and gets documented in the Wiki – once.

Running a containerized ActiveDirectory for developers

If you develop software for larger organizations one big aspect is integrating it with existing infrastructure. While you may prefer simple deployments of services in docker containers a customer may want you to deploy to their wildfly infrastructure for example.

One common case of infrastructure is an Active Directory (AD) or plain LDAP service used for organization wide authentication and authorization. As a small company we do not have such an infrastructure ourselves and it would not be a great idea to use it for development anyway.

So how do you develop and test your authentication module without an AD being available for you?

Fortunately, nowadays this is relatively easy using tools like Docker and Samba. Let us see how to put such a development infrastructure up and where the pitfalls are.

Running Samba in a Container

Samba cannot only serve windows shares or act as an domain controller for Microsoft Windows based networks but includes a full AD implementation with proper LDAP support. It takes a small amount of work besides installing Samba in a container to set it up, so we have two small shell scripts for setup and launch in a container. I think most of the Dockerfile and scripts should be self-explanatory and straightforward:

Dockerfile:

FROM ubuntu:20.04

RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install samba krb5-config winbind smbclient 
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install iproute2
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install openssl
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install vim

RUN rm /etc/krb5.conf
RUN mkdir -p /opt/ad-scripts

WORKDIR /opt/ad-scripts

CMD chmod +x *.sh && ./samba-ad-setup.sh && ./samba-ad-run.sh

samba-ad-setup.sh:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

info () {
    echo "[INFO] $@"
}

info "Running setup"

# Check if samba is setup
[ -f /var/lib/samba/.setup ] && info "Already setup..." && exit 0

info "Provisioning domain controller..."

info "Given admin password: ${SMB_ADMIN_PASSWORD}"

rm /etc/samba/smb.conf

samba-tool domain provision\
 --server-role=dc\
 --use-rfc2307\
 --dns-backend=SAMBA_INTERNAL\
 --realm=`hostname`\
 --domain=DEV-AD\
 --adminpass=${SMB_ADMIN_PASSWORD}

mv /etc/samba/smb.conf /var/lib/samba/private/smb.conf

touch /var/lib/samba/.setup

Using samba-ad-run.sh we start samba directly instead of running it as a service which you would do outside a container:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

[ -f /var/lib/samba/.setup ] || {
    >&2 echo "[ERROR] Samba is not setup yet, which should happen automatically. Look for errors!"
    exit 127
}

samba -i -s /var/lib/samba/private/smb.conf

With the scripts and the Dockerfile in place you can simply build the container image using a command like

docker build -t dev-ad -f Dockerfile .

We then run it like follows and use the local mounts to preserve the data in the AD we will be using for testing and toying around:

 docker run --name dev-ad --hostname ldap.schneide.dev --privileged -p 636:636 -e SMB_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin123! -v $PWD/:/opt/ad-scripts -v $PWD/samba-data:/var/lib/samba dev-ad

To have everything running seamlessly you should add the specified hostname – ldap.schneide.dev in our example – to /etc/hosts so that all tools work as expected and like it was a real AD host somewhere.

Testing our setup

Now of course you may want to check if your development AD works as expected and maybe add some groups and users which you need for your implementation to work.

While there are a bunch of tools for working with an AD/LDAP I found the old and sturdy LdapAdmin the easiest and most straightforward to use. It comes as one self-contained executable file (downloadable from Sourceforge) ready to use without installation or other hassles.

After getting the container and LdapAdmin up and running and logging in you should see something like this below:

LdapAdmin Window showing our Samba AD

Then you can browse and edit your active directory to fit your needs allowing you to develop your authentication and authorization module based on LDAP.

I hope you found the above useful for you development setup.