OBSOLETE!

All this crap is no longer needed with Docker 1.3 and latest boot2docker.

Auto-mount host folder in boot2docker

This project allows you to build a custom boot2docker.iso that will auto-mount a virtual box shared folder called dev-home on /dev-home when boot2docker starts up (so you don't have to run mount manually).

I take zero credit for this work. Read Matthias Kadenbach's excellent post to understand why this is painful and how this solution came about.

I customized Matthias' image because I did not want to mount all of /Users and because I wanted to experiment with running as non-root in the docker container. But that's literally all the diff.

Building the image

Clone this repo and cd into the directory. Make sure boot2docker is running. Then:

$ docker build -t mattes/boot2docker-vbga .

This will take a bit. Rebuilds will be faster because of docker's caching of intermediary containers / FS layers. The command will build an iso and store it inside the container file system. To get it out, I use the same trick as Matthias. In one terminal, I run:

$ docker run -t -i mattes/boot2docker-vbga bash

then, in another terminal, I pick up the container id:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                            COMMAND                CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES
d182bce465ec        mattes/boot2docker-vbga:latest   bash                   8 seconds ago       Up 4 seconds                            mad_meitner

(you'll see a different ID). Then I use docker's cp command to copy out the image:

$ docker cp d182bce465ec:/boot2docker.iso /tmp/boot2docker.iso

Now stop boot2docker on your host system, make a backup of your current iso and copy the new one in place:

$ boot2docker stop
$ cp ~/.boot2docker/boot2docker.iso ~/.boot2docker/boot2docker.works
$ mv /tmp/boot2docker.iso ~/.boot2docker/boot2docker.iso

Before you start boot2docker again, set up a virtual box shared folder named "dev-home":

$ VBoxManage sharedfolder add boot2docker-vm --name dev-home --hostpath /path-of-your-choice

A dev-home is a top-level home folder for all your development projects where each project will be the home folder of the docker user. This allows you to hop into a docker container and have the home folder of the user live on your host system (and therefore be persistent across docker runs).

See the hdev project for an example Docker container that uses this configuration.