new Blog( perso );

On this blog post I'll focus on the last one.

Working on CloudBees Docker Custom Build Environment Plugin (aka "oki docki"), I had to use docker exec and pass extra environment variables, but it doesn't offer such an option. To get my work done I used a workaround assuming env is available in the target container, but was not pleased by this option.

So on my spare time (sic) I've looked into Docker code, and understood this option isn't supported because ... nobody asked for it so far - actually, IIUC, the underlying RunC container engine fully support passing environment from exec, as the plumbing code is actually shared with docker run.

Getting the project

I made few mistakes before I understood Go programming conventions. So, created ~/go and declared GOPATH accordingly, then cloned docker git repo under $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker. With this setup, I can open the project root in Intellij Idea with Go plugin installed, and get a nice development environment.

I'm far from being fluent in Go language, but docker source code is modular so make it pretty simple to search, and Idea can be used to lookup method usage and such things.



As a result, I added few lines of code

Building

Docker builds inside Docker - and docker is running on my machine inside boot2docker. This Russian dolls setup makes the build process a bit complex.

First, prepare a development environment. For this purpose simply use the Dockerfile present at docker project root:

docker build -t dry-run-test .

Use this docker image, bind mounting the project source, to cross-compile docker binary

docker run --privileged --rm -ti -v `pwd`:/go/src/github.com/docker/docker docker-dev hack/make.sh binary cross

You will get the binary for all platforms created under bundles/1.9.0-dev/cross
Testing

As I'm a both lazy and a Java developer I can't read ngrep output and learn how to, so installed Charles Proxy and ran :

unset DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY

http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8888 ./bundles/1.9.0-dev/cross/darwin/amd64/docker exec --env FOO=BAR 1234 bash

Cool, now have to build and run the docker daemon and check how to get this new option passed to the container engine. Time to get back to work :)