Chaperone is a lean init-style startup manager for Docker-like containers. It runs as a single lightweight full-featured process which runs at the root of a docker container tree and provides all of the following functionality, plus much more:
- Monitoring for all processes in the container, automatically shutting down the container when the last process exits.
- A complete, configurable syslog facility built in and provided on /dev/log so daemons and other services can have output captured. Configurable to handle log-file rotation, duplication to stdout/stderr, and full Linux logging facility, severity support. No syslog daemon is required in your container.
- The ability to start up system services in dependency order, with options for per-service environment variables, restart options, and stdout/stderr capture either to the log service or stdout.
- A built-in cron scheduling service.
- Emulation of systemd notifications (sd_notify) so services can post ready and status notifications to chaperone.
- Process monitoring and zombie elimination, along with organized system shutdown to assure all daemons shut-down gracefully.
- The ability to have an optional controlling process, specified on the docker command line, to simplify creating containers which have development mode vs. production mode.
- Complete configuration using a
chaperone.ddirectory which can be located in various places, and even allows different configurations within the container, triggered based upon which user is selected at start-up. - Default behavior designed out-of-the-box to work with simple Docker containers for quick start-up for lean containers.
- More...
If you want to try it out quickly, the best place to start is on the chaperone-docker repository page. There is a quick section called "Try it out" that uses images available now on Docker Hub.
For full details of features and usage: see the documentation.
There is some debate about whether docker containers should be transformed into complete systems (so-called "fat containers"). However, it is clear that many containers contain one or more services to provide a single "composite feature", but that such containers need a special, more streamlined approach to managing a number of common daemons.
Chaperone is the best answer I've come up with so far, and was inspired by The Phusion baseimage-docker approach. However, unlike the Phusion image, it does not require adding daemons for logging, system services (such as runit). Chaperone is designed to be self-contained.
Chaperone is now stable and ready for production. If you are currently starting up your container services with Bash scripts, Chaperone is probably a much better choice.
Full status is now part of the documentation.
The easiest way to install `chaperoneis usingpip`` from the https://pypi.python.org/pypi/chaperone package:
# Ubuntu or debian prerequisites...
apt-get install python3-pip
# chaperone installation (may be all you need)
pip3 install chaperone
Copyright (c) 2015, Gary J. Wisniewski [email protected]
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
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