Meteor Docker Pad

This piece of software mostly derives from the work of meteor-launchpad. At first I was thinking about submitting PR, but I reconsidered when I found I did too many modifications in jshimko code !

Features

Using this docker image as a base for your dockerized Meteor projects enables you to:

• choose your flavor of NodeJS
• choose your version of Meteor you want to build against (helps with testing with new versions)
• let you add extra packages if needed
• use directly your settings.json file without any need to take care of it
• install Meteor direct dependencies:
  • MongoDB if you want to have a all-in-one Meteor package to deploy (not recommanded for production environment)
  • NginX if you want to serve static files directly from it (highly recommanded for production environment)

How it works

This image is based on the official NodeJS packaged Docker images. Mostly it provides a ground layer to build your Meteor apps upon. You can use it in two ways:

• use the prebuilt Docker image
• build your own customized launchpad image

Using the prebuilt Docker image

You can do that simply by starting your Dockerfile with :

FROM oorabona/meteor-dockerpad:dev

If you want to use the development version of DockerPad. Roughly difference between the two are about NodeJS version used. By default, development always use the latest NodeJS version (latest or stretch). production environment use at the moment NodeJS version codenamed BORON.

FROM oorabona/meteor-dockerpad:boron

I do not know yet if I will maintain these versions alongside with official NodeJS versions. As a matter of fact this is why there is a build.sh script.

Build your own customized launchpad image

If for whatever reason you want to customize the build, it will be just a matter of minutes to do so.

$ git clone this repo
$ NODE_VERSION=<your_version> ./build.sh [your_base_image_name]
$ ./build.sh mynamespace/mylaunchpad

This will build only the development version of the image. Now, if you want to go further in the production stages, you can iterate with version tags:

$ NODE_VERSION=<your_version> ./build.sh [your_base_image_name] [tag]
$ ./build.sh mynamepsace/mylaunchpad boron

And it will also produce the development version all at once !

Be very careful, NODE_VERSION is the only way to specify the NodeJS version you want to build against. I.e. issuing the following command NODE_VERSION=stretch ./build.sh mynamespace/mylaunchpad boron will produce an image named mynamespace/mylaunchpad:boron but with stretch NodeJS !!!

I designed this to work this way to allow maximum flexibility wether you feel like you want to version your images or just put dev and prod tags.

Flexibility comes at a certain price for sure.

Project build options

As you can see from the Dockerfile, scripts are ONBUILD meaning they will re-run everytime you build your derived images.

That allows most of the customisation described below:

Environment variable	Description	Present in launchpad.conf	Default value
APT_GET_INSTALL	Put here all packages you would need to install with apt	No	No
TOOL_NODE_FLAGS	Additional node flags to pass when building your project	No	No
METEOR_VERSION	Meteor version to download and build against	Yes	Value taken from .meteor/release
METEOR_SETTINGS_FILE	The Meteor settings.json file you want to use	Yes	settings.json
INSTALL_MONGO	Name says it all, if you want to install set it to true	Yes	No
INSTALL_NGINX	Name says it all, if you want to install set it to true	Yes	No

Note: launchpad.conf file has precedence over ENV variables (even ONBUILD ones) defined in the Dockerfile.

Deep dive

This docker image relies on su-exec instead of gosu and installs it to /usr/local/bin/.

Reason for that is that this very important tool does not need all the Go language and its overwhelming dependencies at all to be efficient. So, to minimize image size and maximize efficiency, the bare C version is more than enough 😄

What it does:

1. Installs user prerequisites with apt-get
2. Copy source code to container path /opt/meteor/src
3. Download and install Meteor based on the version found in .meteor/release
4. Installs npm prerequisites if package.json is found
5. Put some safe place under /etc your settings.json file for use later. It uses environment variable METEOR_SETTINGS_FILE for that purpose if you want to customize its name
6. It checks whether you want to install MongoDB or not (INSTALL_MONGO environment variable see above) and do the work
7. It checks whether you want to install NginX or not (INSTALL_NGINX environment variable see above) and do the work
8. Builds the Meteor project using --production flag
9. It finishes npm install-ation on the server side
10. It cleans up working directories (source, Meteor installation...)
11. And cleans the container of everything that is no longer necessary

Kudos

Of course @jshimko, @docker and the @meteor team for all their outstanding work !

License

This is of course MIT based license !

Contribute

Feel free to submit issues and PR are most welcomed too ! 😄