Homeport

Installing

Homeport is a single bash script. You can install it by downloading it from GitHub and making it executable.

$ curl URL
$ chmod 755 homeport

Alternatively, you can extract the script from and existing Homeport image.

$ docker run --rm homeport/ubuntu > homeport
$ chmod 755 homeport

Running

Homeport has a homeport run command that takes agruments identical to the run command of your installed docker. You run a Homeport image by invoking

$ homeport [docker options] run [docker run options] <homeport image>

When Homeport runs it will add Homeport specific arguments your run command. Specifically, it will...

• mount the Homeport home directory volume,
• mount ~/.ssh at /home/homeport/.ssh,
• mount /var/run/docker.sock at /var/run/docker.sock, (TODO maybe optional)
• publish port 22,
• run detached,
• label the container io.homeport=true, (TODO What? Why io?),
• change the entry point to the Homeport sshd start script.

$ homeport run --net development --name dev --hostname dev image/ubuntu

Configure SSH

To connect to the Homeport image you create an SSH config file using homeport config. For this to work you need to include the Homeport managed SSH configuration in your ~/.ssh/config. Add the following line to your ~/.ssh/config.

Include ~/.ssh/homeport.config

Now you can configure ssh with the homeport config command.

$ homeport config dev --alias development
$ ssh -A development

Now you can use all of the ssh features to communicate with your container. You can scp and rsync files and browse wiht sftp. I find these to be more performant and easier to work with than the slow file mounting between OS X and a Linux container.

Building Homeport

Homeport will emit a Dockerfile for Ubuntu or Apline. You can build a Homeport image by piping that file from homeport dockerfile to docker build.

$ homeport dockerfile --distro ubuntu | docker build -t homeport/ubuntu -

If you want to create your own customized Homeport image start with one of the emitted Dockerfiles and customize it.

X11

Best I can get so far is this...

https://medium.com/@mreichelt/how-to-show-x11-windows-within-docker-on-mac-50759f4b65cb

Which requires X11 authentication to be off. Would have to spend more time learning about magic cookies and trying to determine what's wrong with my netowrk configuration. Do note that address family has to be inet and not any for the socket to even spawn in the container when you ssh -X or ssh -Y.

Rationalizations

Homeport is written in bash since most distributions will have bash available when installed to a server or workstation. It would be nice to be able to run with ash or some lowest-common-denominator shell, but in order to have a form of argument parsing that can mimic docker arguments I need a full GNU getopts and the bash implementation by Aron Griffis works well and works on bash 3.2 so that we can support OS X.

TODO

Probably need an install step to create the home directory and such so that we don't stomp on something that belongs to the user (but would the home directory really stomp?)