Starting a Compose App

By the end of this exercise, you should be able to:

• Read a basic docker compose yaml file and understand what components it is declaring
• Start, stop, and inspect the logs of an application defined by a docker compose file

Preparing Service Images

1. Download the Dockercoins app from github:

   PS: node-0 Administrator> git clone -b ee2.1 `
       https://github.com/docker-training/orchestration-workshop-net.git
   PS: node-0 Administrator> cd orchestration-workshop-net
   

   This app consists of 5 services: a random number generator rng, a hasher, a backend worker, a redis queue, and a web frontend; the code you just downloaded has the source code for each process and a Dockerfile to containerize each of them.

2. Have a brief look at the source for each component of your application. Each folder under ~/orchestration-workshop-net/ contains the application logic for the component, and a Dockerfile for building that logic into a Docker image. We've pre-built these images as training/dc_rng:1.0, training/dc_worker:1.0 et cetera, so no need to build them yourself.

3. Have a look in docker-compose.yml; especially notice the services section. Each block here defines a different Docker service. They each have exactly one image which containers for this service will be started from, as well as other configuration details like network connections and port exposures. Full syntax for Docker Compose files can be found here: https://dockr.ly/2iHUpeX.

Starting the App

1. Stand up the app:

   PS: node-0 orchestration-workshop-net> docker-compose up
   

   After a moment, your app should be running; visit <node 0 public IP>:8000 to see the web frontend visualizing your rate of Dockercoin mining.

2. Logs from all the running services are sent to STDOUT. Let's send this to the background instead; kill the app with CTRL+C, and start the app again in the background:

   PS: node-0 orchestration-workshop-net> docker-compose up -d
   

3. Check out which containers are running thanks to Compose:

   PS: node-0 orchestration-workshop-net> docker-compose ps
   
                  Name                              Command               State          Ports
   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   orchestration-workshop-net_hasher_1   dotnet run                       Up      0.0.0.0:8002->80/tcp
   orchestration-workshop-net_redis_1    redis-server.exe C:\Redis\ ...   Up      6379/tcp
   orchestration-workshop-net_rng_1      dotnet run                       Up      0.0.0.0:8001->80/tcp
   orchestration-workshop-net_webui_1    node webui.js                    Up      0.0.0.0:8000->80/tcp
   orchestration-workshop-net_worker_1   dotnet run                       Up
   

4. Compare this to the usual docker container ls; do you notice any differences? If not, start a couple of extra containers using docker container run..., and check again.

5. See logs from a Compose-managed app via:

   PS: node-0 orchestration-workshop-net> docker-compose logs
   

Conclusion

In this exercise, you saw how to start a pre-defined Compose app, and how to inspect its logs. Application logic was defined in each of the five images we used to create containers for the app, but the manner in which those containers were created was defined in the docker-compose.yml file; all runtime configuration for each container is captured in this manifest. Finally, the different elements of Dockercoins communicated with each other via service name; the Docker daemon's internal DNS was able to resolve traffic destined for a service, into the IP or MAC address of the corresponding container.