HinD - Hashistack-in-Docker

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Installs nomad, consul, and caddyserver (router) together as a mini cluster running inside a docker container.

Nomad jobs will run as docker containers on the VM itself, orchestrated by nomad, leveraging docker.sock.

The brilliant consul-template will be used as "glue" between consul and caddyserver -- turning caddyserver into an always up-to-date reverse proxy router from incoming requests' Server Name Indication (SNI) to running containers :)

Setup and run

This will "bootstrap" your cluster with a private, unique NOMAD_TOKEN, and docker run a new container with the hind service into the background.

docker run --net=host --privileged -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -e HOST_HOSTNAME=$(hostname -f) -e HOST_UNAME=$(uname) \
  --rm --name hind --pull=always ghcr.io/internetarchive/hind:main

Minimal requirements:

VM you can ssh into
VM with docker daemon
if using a firewall (like ferm, etc.) make sure the following ports are open from the VM to the world:
- 443 - https
- 80 - http (load balancer will auto-upgrade/redir to https)

https

The ideal experience is that you point a dns wildcard at the IP address of the VM running your hind system.

This allows automatically-created hostnames from CI/CD pipelines [deploy] stage to use the [git group/organization + repository name + branch name] to create a nice semantic DNS hostname for your webapps to run as and load from - and everything will "just work".

For example, *.example.com DNS wildcard pointing to the VM where hind is running, will allow https://myteam-my-repo-name-my-branch.example.com to "just work".

We use caddy (which incorporates zerossl and Let's Encrypt) to on-demand create single host https certs as service discovery from consul announces new hostnames.

build locally - if desired (not required)

This is our Dockerfile

git clone https://github.com/internetarchive/hind.git
cd hind
docker build --network=host -t ghcr.io/internetarchive/hind:main .

Setting up jobs

We suggest you use the same approach mentioned in nomad repo README.md which will ultimately use a templated project.nomad file.

Nicely Working Features

We use this in multiple places for one-off "clusters of one" at archive.org. We pair it with our fully templatized project.nomad Working nicely:

secrets, tokens
persistent volumes
deploys with multiple public ports
and more! -- just about everything here

Nomad credentils

Get your nomad access credentials so you can run nomad status anywhere that you have downloaded nomad binary (include home mac/laptop etc.)

From a shell on your VM:

eval $(docker run --rm hind cat /etc/hind)
env |egrep ^NOMAD_

Then, nomad status should work. (Download nomad binary to VM or home dir if/as needed).

You can also open the NOMAD_ADDR (above) in a browser and enter in your NOMAD_TOKEN

You can try a trivial website job spec from the cloned repo:

# you can manually set NOMAD_VAR_BASE_DOMAIN to your wildcard DNS domain name if different from
# the domain of your NOMAD_ADDR
export NOMAD_VAR_BASE_DOMAIN=$(echo "$NOMAD_ADDR" |cut -f2- -d.)
nomad run https://raw.githubusercontent.com/internetarchive/hind/main/etc/hello-world.hcl

GUI, Monitoring, Interacting

see nomad repo README.md for lots of ways to work with your deploys. There you can find details on how to check a deploy's status and logs, ssh into it, customized deploys, and more.
You can setup an ssh tunnel thru your VM so that you can see consul in a browser, eg:

nom-tunnel () {
  [ "$NOMAD_ADDR" = "" ] && echo "Please set NOMAD_ADDR environment variable first" && return
  local HOST=$(echo "$NOMAD_ADDR" |sed 's/^https*:\/\///')
  ssh -fNA -L 8500:localhost:8500 $HOST
}

Then run nom-tunnel and you can see with a browser:
- consul http://localhost:8500/

Add more Virtual Machines to make a HinD cluster

The process is very similar to when you setup your first VM. This time, you pass in some environment variables, the first VM's hostname (already in cluster), and run the shell commands below on your 2nd (or 3rd, etc.) VM.

HIND_FIRST=vm1.example.com
set -u
TOK_C=$(ssh $HIND_FIRST "docker exec hindup zsh -c 'grep -E ^encrypt.= /etc/consul.d/consul.hcl'" |cut -f2- -d= |tr -d '\t "{}')
TOK_N=$(ssh $HIND_FIRST "docker exec hindup zsh -c 'grep -E  encrypt.= /etc/nomad.d/nomad.hcl'"   |cut -f2- -d= |tr -d '\t "{}' )

docker run --net=host --privileged -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -e HIND_FIRST=$HIND_FIRST   -e TOK_C=$TOK_C  -e TOK_N=$TOK_N \
  -e HOST_HOSTNAME=$(hostname -f) -e HOST_UNAME=$(uname) \
  --rm --name hind --pull=always ghcr.io/internetarchive/hind:main

xxx firewall ports

Inspiration

Docker-in-Docker (dind) and kind:

https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/

for caddyserver + consul-connect:

https://blog.tjll.net/too-simple-to-fail-nomad-caddy-wireguard/

Problems?

If the main docker run is not completing, check your docker version to see how recent it is. The nomad binary inside the setup container can segfault due to a perms change. You can either upgrade your docker version or try adding this docker run option:

docker run --security-opt seccomp=unconfined ...

mohammed90 / hind