multiple boot2docker VM configuration

[riobard]

Or do you just have one? I'm asking this because I'm thinking about the placement of the VMDK disk image. If we assume people will have more than one boot2docker VMs, it is a bit weird to have a single VMDK disk image located in ~/.boot2docker/ instead of having it inside the VirtualBox VM folder. It will probably impact the design of config/profile too.

[SvenDowideit]

yes, I do. Not only do i need one for each version of b2d or docker, but then also for different docker backends. Its getting complicated in here.

This is another reason I want flags, and not env vars.

[SvenDowideit]

ideally, I'd like to be able to run b2d 0.8.0-btrfs ssh and have b2d use the config section for that name (and have it default back to the general options if those are missing).

I'm pretty ambivalent about the config file format - though I am wondering if we should do something clever like a /etc/boot2docker/conf.d/ and ~/.boot2docker/conf.d/ which over-rides the defaults in /etc/boot2docker/defaults.conf and ~/.boot2docker/defaults.conf.

that way, sharing a config becomes a matter of sending someone a file..

(and y, I'm expecting things to get complicated at some point - like allowing a config to specify boot params, and containers to auto-run, with particular settings, so that we can use this as a support and test/verification tool)

[riobard]

Yeah I was thinking along similar lines. My original plan was to read boot2docker.conf from the current directory first, then fallback to ~/.boot2docker/boot2docker.conf and finally to /etc/boot2docker.conf. Additionally, I'll make the base folder of VirtualBox VM to be the current directory and put the VMDK and ISO images in it.

This way we could easily isolate different boot2docker VMs with different names (same as the folder names), and the config will not affect each other.

[SvenDowideit]

so multiple vm's is implemented - by you @riobard :) ./boot2docker --vm=somename init though this does not save your settings atm - or by using boot2docker --dir=~/.something

to make it more useful, we should either add a --profile=filename, or use toml subsections in a profile file, and use it as a live store of each --vm (using ini-style sections)

[riobard]

Yup, the multi-vm config part hasn't been done yet––I was basically using the same config to init multiple VM under different names during development and testing.

I'm not sure which way would be better though: all config in one profile, or one config per profile?

[SvenDowideit]

oh crud. I think I need to deal with this now.

Its possible to get into a very confused state as things stand. For example:

1 get boot2docker-cli
2. run boot2docker-cli download - it downloads into wherever you are, lets say ~/Downloads/
3 run boot2docker-cli init
4 .... run happily for a few days/months
5. a new version of boot2docker.iso is out, happy day
6 run boot2docker-cli stop ; download ; start
7 be sad, because the newly started vm still boots the other boot2docker

and all because ... in the absense of a ~/.boot2docker dir, boot2docker download will download to the current dir - and boot2docker init will save wherever the iso was that it had originally.

[SvenDowideit]

and a possible implementation suggestion at #98

[SvenDowideit]

you can still use BOOT2DOCKER_PROFILE

[SvenDowideit]

This is implemented enough using the cli params, if someone needs more, they can implement it ;)

[yqian1991]

I'd like to follow up this topic, it's true that we can use different profile to create multiple boot2docker instances, and we can use boot2docker ssh to login into them.

But how can we connect to different instances outside the vm. as one VM can only has one ip address?
For example. the default vm is boot2docker-vm, and if we run 'docker COMMAND', it will point to the default vm, how can we make it point to other vm?