Yeah, I know. Docker is everywhere. I have read so many articles about it in last few years, but have not used it for anything, have not even tried to run any docker hosts or containers. Why? Just did not have a reason for that. I thought that I did not have any reasons. Until I found these two docker images docker-netatalk and docker-gitlab. This is when I realized, why people like Docker. Because of the community. Because of the number of awesome images available on GitHub and supported by community.

I’m not going to write one more introduction into Docker type of article. I will just give you some links and show you how I use it at home.

Where to start?

At first you need to get familiar with Docker. Just go and read some basics About Docker.

At second you need to install docker. In my case I have docker installed on my Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (with kernel 3.13). To install it on Ubuntu just follow the docker manual Docker-maintained Package Installation (I would recommend to install Docker-maintained packages instead of Ubuntu-maintained).

At third read about Docker Compose which allows you to persist settings about running docker containers. You can look on more information about Docker Compose on GitHub.

And after that let’s take a look on what you can do with Docker.

Docker-GitLab

Do you want to have you own Git server? Try GitLab. To install it use Docker-Gitlab.

Docker-GitLab has very good README.md file, and it is very configurable. This image has few dependencies, but you should not be worried by that, with Docker it is very easy to set everything up.

I can just show you what I have in my docker-compose.yaml file

gitlabpostgresql:
    image: sameersbn/postgresql:latest
    volumes:
        - /mnt/DATA/gitlab-postgresql:/var/lib/postgresql
    environment:
        - DB_NAME=gitlabhq_production
        - DB_USER=gitlab
        - DB_PASS=<StrongDBPassword>
    mem_limit: 4g
    cpu_shares: 256
    restart: always

gitlabredis:
    image: sameersbn/redis:latest
    volumes:
        - /mnt/DATA/gitlab-redis:/var/lib/redis
    mem_limit: 4g
    cpu_shares: 256
    restart: always

gitlab:
    hostname: gitlab
    image: sameersbn/gitlab:7.8.4
    links:
        - gitlabpostgresql:postgresql
        - gitlabredis:redisio
    volumes:
        - /mnt/DATA/gitlab-data:/home/git/data
        - /mnt/BACKUP/gitlab-backups:/home/git/backups
    environment:
        - VIRTUAL_HOST=gitlab
        - GITLAB_EMAIL=gitlab@example.com
        - SMTP_USER=outcoldman
        - SMTP_PASS=<MySmtpPassword>
        - SMTP_HOST=smtp.sendgrid.net
        - GITLAB_PORT=80
        - GITLAB_SSH_PORT=10022
        - GITLAB_HOST=gitlab
        - GITLAB_BACKUP_DIR=/home/git/backups
        - GITLAB_BACKUPS=daily
        - GITLAB_BACKUP_EXPIRY=1209600
        - OAUTH_GITHUB_API_KEY=<ReadAboutThisInREADME.md>
        - OAUTH_GITHUB_APP_SECRET=<ReadAboutThisInREADME.md>
    ports:
        - "10022:22"
    mem_limit: 2g
    cpu_shares: 256
    restart: always

Let’s take a look on this configuration in details:

• I have three containers defined here. One for running postgresql, second for redis and last one is the gitlab container.
• As you can see gitlab has links to first two containers. As you see I don’t even set Database password to the gitlab container, as it can get it from gitlabpostgresql container on its own using variables defined in linked container.
• For each container I specified mem_limit based on recommendations and my feeling about how I will use them.
• For each container I specified cpu_shares where 1024 means 100%, see Runtime constraints on CPU and memory.
• For each container I specified restart always as I want to have this container booted even after I reboot my host.
• For each container I specified volumes, which I want to mount to them from my host server. I want to store real data on my host server, because if I will rebuild docker container I can keep my data. You can also see that one of the volumes contains backups from GitLab.
• I use SendGrid for SMTP.
• As you can see in my environment I access GitLab by url http://gitlab, this is why this hostname is specified in GITLAB_HOST and VIRTUAL_HOST (this one is not a variable required by GitLab, I will tell you below why I have it) and this is why I have GITLAB_PORT=80.
• As you can see I expose to server only one port 10022 as a SSH port of GitLab server.I don’t want to expose it as port 22 because I still want to use 22 for host.
• Read about OAUTH_GITHUB_* keys here GitHub.

I knew that I will need port 80 on my home server for more than just GitLab. This is why I decided also to setup reverse proxy with nginx. It is very easy to do with nginx-proxy docker image. This is another Docker container I have defined (still in docker-compose.yml)

nginxproxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    ports:
        - 80:80
    volumes:
        - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock
    mem_limit: 512m
    cpu_shares: 128
    restart: always

VIRTUAL_HOST from gitlab container helps this container to auto configure reverse proxy.

But to make it work you need to have a DNS record on your client machine about gitlab hostname. I did that very easy by specifying this record in my DD-WRT router. If you don’t have ability to do that with router you have two options: specify this as a static record on all of your machines in /etc/hosts (%WIN_DIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) or you can configure your own DNS server with dnsmasq docker image.

Now you can install other images (redmine, owncloud) and host all of them on the same server. Name the product, my bet you can find docker image for it.

To start all of defined containers, just run in the same folder where you saved your docker-compose.yml (I store it under /etc with rw permissions for root only)

docker-compose up -d

Netatalk

One of the ways to install Netatalk is to use one of the manuals available on the web, I also wrote one AFP Server (for OS X). But the problem with all of them - always hard to keep them up do date. Is there are better way? Of course, just use a docker image docker-netatalk. This image is not so configurable as GitLab image, so to make it work as you want you probably need to do a little bit more steps. I found that the easiest way to configure it with my needs is to build my own image based on this image. Just a note I use Netatalk only as a TimeMachine server. For file sharing I use Samba …without Docker.

I have two files, my own afp.conf, which is based on the afp.conf file from original image

; Netatalk 3.x configuration file
;

[Global]
; Global server settings

; enable spotlight and correct the dbus daemon path
dbus daemon = /usr/bin/dbus-daemon
spotlight = yes

; provide AFP runtime statistics (connected users, open volumes) via dbus.
afpstats = yes

; no need in guest access, only user accounts
uam list = uams_dhx2.so uams_dhx.so

; output log entries to stdout instead of syslog
log file = /dev/stdout
log level = default:note

hostname = timemachine
zeroconf = yes

[TimeMachine]
    path = /TimeMachine
    time machine = yes
    vol size limit = 1000000
    valid users = outcoldman

As you can see I only define my own hostname (timemachine, which I also expose with my DNS server) and define my time machine share TimeMachine.

The second file is the Dockerfile (the file which is used to build my custom image)

FROM cptactionhank/netatalk:latest
MAINTAINER Denis Gladkikh "https://github.com/outcoldman"

RUN groupadd -g1000 outcoldman
RUN useradd --no-create-home -u1000 -g1000 -G users outcoldman
RUN echo "outcoldman:MySpecialPassword" | chpasswd 

COPY ./afp.conf /etc/netatalk/afp.conf

Here I just create user outcoldman with the same uid as I have on my host server, so if I will need to access these files from my host server I will have the same permissions as user in Docker container.

After that just run command

docker build -t my/netatalk .

This command will build your own image.

Now you can update your docker-compose.yml file to include timemachine container

timemachine:
    image: my/netatalk
    volumes:
        - /mnt/BACKUP/TimeMachine:/TimeMachine
    mem_limit: 512m
    cpu_shares: 128
    net: host
    hostname: timemachine
    restart: always

And just run

docker-compose up -d timemachine

See Also

• Ubuntu as a home server. Part 3. AFP Server.