minicuper / docker-tinynode

A small buildroot-based image for Docker, with NodeJS installed. Clocks in around 30MB.

docker-tinynode

A small buildroot-based image for Docker, with NodeJS installed. It clocks in around 30MB.

The following useful modules/frameworks are installed:

• NodeJS version 0.10.30
• Express version 4.9.8
• CoffeeScript version 1.8.0
• Socket IO version 1.1.0
• Underscore.js version 1.7.0
• forever version 0.11.1

Currently using buildroot 2014.08

If you want to install different frameworks or specific versions, edit the tinynode_defconfig file, specifically the BR2_PACKAGE_NODEJS_MODULES_ADDITIONAL parameter. Everything there just gets passed to npm as-is, so you can specify things like forever@0.11.1 if you want that specific version.

What do I do with this?

It's pretty much up to you! I'm assuming you're already familiar with Docker -- if you aren't, I suggest you read up on the Docker documentation. https://docs.docker.com/userguide/

Here's a few ideas/pointers.

Bind-mount a volume with your script (easy)

So let's say your nodejs app is in a folder at /data/myapp - replace that with wherever your actual script is. And let's say your script is named app.js, and I'm going to assume your script is running something on port 8080.

You can mount the app's folder into the container with the -v parameter. You can place it anywhere you want, but the image is using /home/default as its working directory, so I recommend placing it somewhere in there.

The image's ENTRYPOINT parameter is forever - meaning when you start a container, anything you write out after the image name will be passed to forever. So at the minimum, you'll need the path to the script you want to run, but you can also pass options to forever - they're all listed in forever's readme

The one action you do not want to pass to forever is start - that causes forever to fork and detach and run as a daemon. Docker expects programs to not do that, so the container will just immediately exit if you use start

So putting it all together, you can run a command line:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -v /data/myapp:/home/default/myapp jprjr/tinynode myapp/app.js

• The -p 8080:8080 means to connect your host machine's port 8080 to the container port 8080.
• the -v /data/myapp:/home/default/myapp will mount /data/myapp (on your host) to /home/default/myapp (in the container)
• jprjr/tinynode is the name of the image
• myapp/app.js is the argument you're passing to forever - since the image's working directory is /home/default you can use a relative path.

If you need more ports, you can just add more -p arguments, nd if you need to mount more folders, just add more -v arguments, etc. You could replace myapp/app.js with -w myapp/app.js and forever will autoreload the script when the file changes.

Build a new image from this one (less easy)

Just create a Dockerfile and begin with

FROM jprjr/tinynode

And do whatever you want. Your image will inherit a few things by default, like the ENTRYPOINT, WORKDIR, and USER parameters. Then in your Dockerfile, you can use commands like ADD to place your script into your new image, but then you'd have to rebuild the image anytime you update/change your app. This is why I recommend mounting a volume instead.

You can overwrite any of those parameters if you want, and you could add a CMD parameter if you want a default command to get passed to forever, etc.