VirtualBox Guest Additions

[tianon]

To provide some context about why this is being reintroduced despite so many expressed reservations, "boot2docker" currently is essentially the "Docker daemon for Mac OS / Windows". On Mac OS at least, where we have a native Docker client, the experience of talking to your "Docker daemon" currently lacks the ability to bind mount files, which causes a lot of problems including fig not working as it should. This is being pushed as a simple stopgap solution to that specific problem while other more sustainable solutions are developed in Docker itself (such as is proposed in moby/moby#7249).

This builds upon the work in #284. Also, this includes a hacky init script that @bfirsh gets to take all the credit for that tries to mount /Users and/or /c/Users, since we can't run VBoxService proper (thanks to hairy issues with 32bit userspace of TCL; good times). The init script will bail quickly and quietly on non-VirtualBox machines or on VirtualBox machines that don't have one of those two shares.

This has been tested on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you'd like to test it out without any changes to boot2docker-cli, use:

• Mac OS X: VBoxManage sharedfolder add boot2docker-vm --name /Users --hostpath /Users --automount
• Windows: VBoxManage.exe sharedfolder add boot2docker-vm --name /c/Users --hostpath C:/Users --automount (note that this will NOT WORK from inside the msys bash shell because of http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Posix_path_conversion - you must either run it from cmd directly, or create the share of C:\Users named as /c/Users manually)

This will make it so that things like docker run -v "$(pwd)":/some/container/path ... work as you'd expect from Mac OS, and also so that the /Users or /c/Users directory is available for easy access when you boot2docker ssh into your VM.

As a side note, if anyone has ideas for how to disable or prevent that msys path conversion from happening without linking against msys.dll, please please please let me know (I can't find anything useful).

[sfitts]

I've run into the msys auto-conversion thing myself and the only thing I've found is that if you add an extra / to the path it should prevent the conversion (though you end up with both slashes, so sometimes that doesn't really help). Not sure if trick will work here, but it might be worth a shot (I'll try it out myself at some point, but that won't be for a bit due to other work priorities).

Oh -- and thanks for resurrecting this. I know it is controversial, but it really does make life for those of us working on Windows a lot nicer (the lack of a native Docker client there gives us a few more issues than our Mac brethren).

[SvenDowideit]

Where's the Documentation?

[tianon]

Fair point - I'll write up something. 👍

[dduportal]

That's a good job !

One point to (maybe?) help you : while it's perfectly working with vagrant (see my custom vagrant image, based on the previous work - http://vagrantup.com/dduportal/boot2docker), we should throw an eye on how vagrant did it on Windows ?

[tianon]

Just as an update, I was dealing with some ill family today. I've updated the technical bits here, but hope to get some docs done tomorrow.

[tianon]

Ok, this has some basic documentation now, too. 👍

[SvenDowideit]

This PR is only missing some documentation to say that it does not work for Linux - even if you share /home as Users, it will then be mounted in the wrong place, and the -v $(pwd):/data will thus fail.

once that's done - LTGM

[tianon]

Ok, I've updated with a paragraph about the nonexistent Linux support: (copied here for easier review)

In case it isn't already clear, the Linux host support here is currently hazy.
You can share your /home or /home/jsmith directory as Users or one of the
other supported automount locations listed above, but note that you will then
need to manually convert your docker run -v /home/...:... bind-mount host
paths accordingly (ie, docker run -v /Users/...:...). As noted in the
previous paragraph however, this is likely to change in the future as soon as a
more suitable/scalable solution is found and implemented.

[SvenDowideit]

LGTM - will there be a b2d-cli PR to set these up?

[tianon]

Yeah, that's the plan - I've been working on that on the side while this one got some review. 😄

[bfirsh]

UI is here: boot2docker/boot2docker-cli#258

This will be in the next official release.

[razic]

Wow this actually made it in?

[stevepereira]

Is this release waiting to sync with the next Docker release?

[tianon]

Yes, boot2docker releases are synced to Docker releases, so this will be in
1.3 or 1.2.1, whichever comes first.

[gansbrest]

VirtualBox Guest Additions are unusable/slow for project with lots of small files ( tested with 17K files ). Is it just me?

I created Hodor github.com/gansbrest/hodor to streamline dev workflow for Mac and Linux. Let me know what you guys think.

[SchumacherFM]

Nice work @gansbrest !
Sounds like a great solution as we are using Magento with the same amount of files and it is so slow via shared folders ...

But I don't like Ruby so I'm gonna to rewrite it in Go. I also need the sync on Windows :-(
Go has a library for cross plattform sync: https://github.com/howeyc/fsnotify no idea if that works well....

[AkeemMcLennon]

Hmm, @gansbrest and @SchumacherFM bring up some interesting points and ideas.

However, since these changes are ultimately intended for the fig project, perhaps it might be useful to integrate this filesystem monitoring into Fig directly?

[bfirsh]

You might be interested in docker/compose#184

[huahaiy]

These changes should be independent from Fig. The results of Fig's monitoring filesystem change is to rebuild and reload the container, but that may be too expensive. People often prefer to use their development environment's own system reloading mechanism, e.g. Clojure's lein-ring, etc. boot2docker should support these use cases.

[SvenDowideit]

@huahaiy there is nothing in these changes that are dependant on fig - there are comanion changes in boot2docker-cli to make it work. - if you read @AkeemMcLennon 's comment, it asks about integrating this change into fig :)

[gansbrest]

Sorry guys, I'm not too familiar with fig. From the brief look, Hodor seem to follow similar concepts ( define config and run task ). You may probably take and integrate file sync/forwarding parts. I just wanted to create simple tool to allow our team to do develop in the docker environment efficiently.

[dekz]

Correct me if I am wrong but no longer have to build from source (as per @sciutand comment) for this support, you can just curl the iso and use that.

http://static.dockerfiles.io/boot2docker-v1.2.0-virtualbox-guest-additions-v4.3.14.iso

[tianon]

That ISO isn't an official release. ;)

[dekz]

Oh maybe I misunderstood based on the URL.

Would you say one should follow the original @sciutand advice in building and copying the ISO over then?

[gaastonsr]

If the above ISO works why not use it?

[abilash222]

the above ISO is not working. /User directory is not mounted

[dekz]

@abilash222 did you use VBoxManage to share the folder into boot2docker?

[vmaatta]

Ok so folders on the Mac host (under $HOME) can now be shared with the container… and you can do nothing with them:

Operation not permitted, Permission denied, could not create directory…

I've tried chowning them to 999:999, changed folder rights to 777… and still, those volume folders are just as unusable from the container.

E.g. -v ($HOME)/projects/data/db/:/var/lib/postgresql/data/

[michaelneale]

@vmaatta I ran `docker -it -v /Users:/Users ubuntu:14.04 /bin/bash' and was able to ls and cat files from my him dir just fine - this is stock Docker 1.3

[vmaatta]

Ok, say:

1. docker run -v /Users/vmaatta/test:/tmp/test -it --rm debian:latest bash: I can manually read, write files and create folders in the container.
2. I make the same folder a data volume for a postgres /var/lib/postgresql/data and here's the result:

fixing permissions on existing directory /var/lib/postgresql/data ... ok
creating subdirectories ... initdb: could not create directory "/var/lib/postgresql/data/global": Permission denied
initdb: removing contents of data directory "/var/lib/postgresql/data"

The same with a different container, a web server that needs to write all kinds of files, they both fail with the aforementioned access problems.

[vmaatta]

And it seems there's an issue for it… #581. The release notes are really quite misleading / missing an important note.

[huahaiy]

@vmaatta I seem to be able to run postgres container just fine on boot2docker, see my Postgres Dockerfile here. initdb run as the user postgres, so make sure that user have permission on the $PGDATA directory.