Simon Willison’s Weblog

Andrew Godwin’s www-router Docker container (via) Really clever Docker trick: a container that runs Nginx and uses it to route traffic to other containers based on the hostname—but the hostnames to be routed are configured using environment variables which the run-nginx.py CMD script uses to dynamically construct an nginx config when the container starts. # 21st February 2018, 5:04 am

Building a Full-Text Search App Using Docker and Elasticsearch. Deep, comprehensive tutorial from Patrick Triest showing how to use docker-compose to run three containers (Node API, nginx static content, elasticsearch) and then use that to build a neat Vue.js web search UI against 100 books from Project Gutenberg. # 1st February 2018, 3:41 pm

How to compile and run a Pony program using Docker. My notes on using the Docker ponylang/ponyc container to compile and execute a Pony program without needing to install anything (since Docker will download and run the image the first time you run the command). # 18th December 2017, 9:47 pm

Inside Docker’s “FROM scratch” (via) I’m a big fan of understanding your abstractions. Here’s a neat tutorial that dives deep into Docker’s “scratch” image which offers the smallest possible Docker image, and hence provides a great opportunity to understand what a Docker container at its most minimal does for you. # 27th November 2017, 4:33 pm

Run the First Edition of Unix (1972) with Docker (via) This is so cool... just run “docker run --rm -it bahamat/unix-1st-ed” to drop into a simulation of a PDP-11 running genuine 1972 era Unix! If you haven’t got into Docker yet, Docker for Mac is a single click install these days and works incredibly well. # 22nd November 2017, 3:36 pm

gzthermal-web (via) I built a quick web application wrapping the gzthermal gzip visualization tool and deployed it to Zeit Now wrapped up in a Docker container. Give it a URL and it shows you a PNG visualization of how gzip encodes that page. # 21st November 2017, 6:24 pm

tuxracer-web. Brilliant Docker hack from David Cooper: just run “docker run -p 8008:80 dtcooper/tuxracer-web” to get Tux Racer (the 3D game) running in your browser, on top a cunning mix of the noVNC HTML5 VNC client and icecast for sound. # 14th November 2017, 11:28 pm

Docker.qcow2 never shrinks—disk space usage leak in docker for mac (via) Interesting year-long thread on disk usage by Docker for Mac, including a bunch of potential workarounds for if it swallows too much disk space. # 5th November 2017, 3:06 pm

Docker Containers on the Desktop (via) Jessie Frazelle’s classic explanation from 2015 of how she runs every desktop application on her Linux machine in its own Docker container. # 5th November 2017, 4:16 am

arxiv-vanity (via) Beautiful new project from Ben Firshman and Andreas Jansson: “Arxiv Vanity renders academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF”. It works by pulling the raw LaTeX source code from Arxiv and rendering it to HTML using a heavily customized Pandoc workflow. The real fun is in the architecture: it’s a Django app running on Heroku which fires up on-demand Hyper.sh Docker containers for each individual rendering job. # 25th October 2017, 8:06 pm

A Brief Intro to Docker for Djangonauts (via) This is great—a really clear introduction to both Docker and Docker Compose, aimed at Django developers. Includes line-by-line annotations of an example Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml. # 18th October 2017, 9:06 pm