frenzy

Experimental Vagrant clone written in Go and using Docker instead of VBox.

Why?

Vagrant is an awesome tool, but it's quite slow - because it uses VMs. For example, if you use it to test your Chef cookbooks (like I do), you quickly lose a lot of time just waiting. I wanted to build something that would do the same thing but much faster by using containers instead of VMs.

Another thing that really mattered to me was parallel booting and provisioning; I'm working on a new automation tool, and I wanted to be able to spin up a fairly large numbers of nodes quickly. Thanks to the power of containers, I now can.

I could have used docker-provider or even vagrant-lxc but, to be honest, I also wanted to have some fun :)

Keep in mind this is experimental so things will probably break, and you can't do much yet.

Usage

• Create a 'Frenzyfile' in a test directory (you can find an example in the example/ directory)
• Pull the image (e.g. docker pull stevedomin/fzy-ubuntu)

$ frenzy up
# [docker] up frenzy01
# [docker] up frenzy02
# [frenzy01] Running inline SSH provisioner
# [frenzy02] Running inline SSH provisioner
# [frenzy01] Hello World
# [frenzy01] Mon Mar 24 15:48:19 UTC 2014
# [frenzy02] Hello World
# [frenzy02] Mon Mar 24 15:48:20 UTC 2014
$ frenzy status
# HOSTNAME  STATUS   CONTAINER ID  PORT
# frenzy01  running  0dddebd56caa  49167
# frenzy02  running  59ca6e6c00d2  49166
$ frenzy destroy
# [docker] destroying frenzy01, id: 0dddebd56caa
# [docker] destroying frenzy02, id: 59ca6e6c00d2

Install

From source

$ go get github.com/stevedomin/frenzy
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/stevedomin/frenzy/frenzy
$ go install

Binary releases

For now you'll have to build it yourself.

Requirements

OS X

$ # Install [boot2docker](https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker)
$ boot2docker stop
$ # Forward VM port range that Docker uses to host
$ for i in {49000..49900}; do
$   VBoxManage modifyvm "boot2docker-vm" --natpf1 "tcp-port$i,tcp,,$i,,$i";
$   VBoxManage modifyvm "boot2docker-vm" --natpf1 "udp-port$i,udp,,$i,,$i";
$ done
$ boot2docker start

Linux

Make sure you have Docker installed

Known caveats

• You need to be able to execute docker commands without sudo
• If you don't pull the image specified in your Frenzyfile manually before using it, the first frenzy up will hang while Docker is downloading the image.

TODO

• Some testing would be good :)
• Move to Docker API instead of Docker CLI
• In progress: Stop command (commit container with image name == node name)
• In progress: Chef provisioner
• Better logging (colored output would be nice)
• Support for volumes
• More networking options