Launching a local environment

Wherever possible, I will try to ensure that the practical exercises in this book will be able to be run on a local machine such as your desktop or laptop. For the purposes of this book, I will assume that your local machine is running either a recent version OS X or an up-to-date Linux distribution and has a high enough specification to run the software mentioned in this chapter.

The two tools we will be using to launch our Docker instances will also run on Windows; therefore, it should be possible to follow the instructions within this, although you may have to refer the usage guides for any changes to the syntax.

Due to the way in which Docker is architected, a lot of the content of this book will have you running commands and interacting with the command line on the virtual server that is acting as the host machine, rather than the containers themselves. Because of this, we will not be using either Docker Machine or Kitematic.

Both of these are tools provided by Docker to quickly bootstrap a Docker-enabled virtual server on your local machine, as unfortunately the host machines deployed by these tools contain a stripped down operating system that is optimized for running Docker with the smallest footprint as possible.

As we will be installing additional packages on the host machines, a stripped down "Docker only" operating system may not have the components available to meet the prerequisites of the software that we will be running in the later chapters; therefore, to ensure that there are no problems further on, we be running a full operating system.

Personally, I prefer a RPM-based operating system such as RedHat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or CentOS, as I have been using them pretty much since the day I first logged into a Linux server.

However, as a lot of readers will be familiar with the Debian-based Ubuntu, I will be providing practical examples for both operating systems.

To ensure the experience is as consistent as possible, we will be installing Vagrant and VirtualBox to run the virtual machine that will act as a host to run our containers.

Vagrant, written by Mitchell Hashimoto, is a command line tool for creating and configuring reproducible and portable virtual machine environments. There have been numerous blog posts and articles that actually pitch Docker against Vagrant; however, in our case, the two technologies work quite well together in providing a repeatable and consistent environment.

Vagrant is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows. For details on how to install, go to the Vagrant website at https://www.vagrantup.com/.

VirtualBox is a great all round open source virtualization platform originally developed by Sun and now maintained by Oracle. It allows you to run both 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems on your local machine. Details on how to download and install VirtualBox can be found at https://www.virtualbox.org/; again, VirtualBox can be installed on Linux, OS X, and Windows.