txagent - Simplified Docker container provisioning.

Stable / Work in progress.

This code is used in production on a few hundred iot devices. It was developed for with a very specific, yet recurring use case. Professionally I develop software for a number of platforms, including iot. As a hobbyist, I have a dozen or so different devices that I provision with Docker. This project is in the early stages of becoming more general purpose. In the mean time, you may have a similar need. txagent is an uncomplicated way to provision iot devices running your Docker containers. Let me know if this project is useful to you and what features you would like to see.

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This project is intended to be a very simple docker container for iot devices, that are able to run docker. txagent has been tested on a few arm based devices, but is primarily used for the Raspberry Pi.

Pushing updates and configuration to devices is a complex and complicated problem, having to keep track of each device and it's state. txagent uses a pull model for basic provisioning.

The container runs a compiled Go application that can be configured to get a remote or local json configuration file, then uses the configuration to pull, run and monitor containers.

Supported Devices

Anything that can run Docker. (Windows is untested)

Getting Started

The agent can be configured with environment variables, command line flags, or a combination on both. Command line argument will override environment variables.

Environment Variables

Prupose	Environment Variable	Flag	Default Value
Container configuration.	AGENT_CFG_URL	-cfg	file://conf/defs.json
Repository authentication.	AGENT_AUTH_URL	-auth	file://conf/auth.json
Poll frequency.	AGENT_CFG_POLL	-poll	30
Remove existing containers on start.		-rm	false

Testing (with source)

Get a list of commands.

go run ./agent.go --help

Example #1: Run example configurations from source.

go run ./agent.go

Using as a lib

see GoDocs https://godoc.org/github.com/txn2/txagent/txagent

Development

Uses goreleaser:

Install goreleaser with brew (mac): brew install goreleaser/tap/goreleaser

Build without releasing: goreleaser --skip-publish --rm-dist --skip-validate

TODO

• Get & check configuration on interval (ensure state)
• Configuration auth
• Validate configs
• Documentation, Use Case and Examples

DONE

• Registry authentication
• Command line flag --rm to remove running containers
• Added command line flags --cfg and --poll (see --help)
• Run containers
• Pull containers
• Create volumes
• Create networks (if they do not exists)
• Load and marshal configuration json