Docker Easy Load Balancer
Experimental automagic load balancing for Docker web apps in less than 100 lines of bash.
Initial setup
On Ubuntu 14.04 hosts, you'll need to install libnss-resolver and run:
apt-get install dnsmasq
echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1:5353" | sudo tee -a /etc/resolver/docker.dev
I suppose you are able to do something similiar when using Macs + Vagrant / boot2docker but I don't own a Mac to put the pieces together, LMK if you know how to make this work over there and I'll update the docs accordingly
Try it
Launch the load balancer and DNS server:
git clone https://github.com/fgrehm/docker-easy-lb.git
cd docker-easy-lb
./launch-host
And verify if things are working:
# Is DNS working?
$ ping hello.docker.dev
PING hello.docker.dev (172.17.0.175) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.17.0.175: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.035 ms
64 bytes from 172.17.0.175: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.072 ms
64 bytes from 172.17.0.175: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.150 ms
^C
# Can we reach the load balancer?
$ curl hello.docker.dev
<html>
<head>
<title>404 - No application configured for this subdomain</title>
<style>
# Lets start a web server exposing the 3000 port
$ docker run -d --name hello -h hello -p 3000 ubuntu:14.04 python3 -m 'http.server' 3000
4e2731f1d2919e9a1259d9c4439e8cfb9953e8d6debbe9f64f66b8455b2ea002
# And verify that the app has been addded to the load balancer
$ curl hello.docker.dev
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ascii">
<title>Directory listing for /</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Directory listing for /</h1>
<hr>
<ul>
....
# Don't forget to clean up
$ docker rm -f hello
How does it work?
When the launch-host script gets run, it will start a dnsmasq server
on your machine pointing any address under *.docker.dev to a fgrehm/easy-lb
container that has the Docker socket /var/run/docker.sock bind mounted inside it. From
there it will use supervisord to kick off Redis +
Hipache + a "service" that will
register a Docker events listener
that responsible for registering / deregistering containers that
expose a port normally used by web apps.
It does not depend on any other tool apart from Docker and dnsmasq itself but it
plays really well with devstep, fig
and basically anything that creates Docker containers that is able to expose the
following ports:
803000400045675000808090009292
Troubleshooting
For some reason that I don't know yet the DNS / load balancer combo stopped
working every now and then during the early days of this project when a container
got removed. Even my Chrome browser crashed sometimes when the dnsmasq started
misbehaving.
When that happens I first try restarting the dnsmasq server launched by the
launch-host script and if it still doesn't work I run:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure ubuntu14-libnss-resolver
docker rm -f easy-lb
./launch-host
If it still doesn't make things work please create an issue with as much information as possible on how to consistently reproduce your problem.
TODO
- Configurable domains
- Register existing containers when bringing the load balancer up
- Create a small app that lists configured apps from
docker.dev - Redirect to list of configured apps in case an invalid domain is accessed
- Provide an example of an init script
- Create an entrypoint that performs some validation before starting supervisord
- Clean up / document code
- Try to setup
dnsmasqas part of the load balancer container
Inspiration
Docker Pull Command
docker pull fgrehm/easy-lb