Vagrant Feature Preview: Docker-Based Development Environments

I've just started using docker (I had to reimage my linode to take advantage of the recent upgrade). I've got nginx and postfix containers running. If anyone can offer some thoughts on the following points I'd be grateful.

1) I built two Dockerfiless on my laptop (one for nginx, one for my postfix setup) tested locally, then scp'd the Dockerfiles over to the server, built images and ran them. I didn't really want to pollute the registry with my stuff. Is this reasonable? For bigger stuff, should I use a private registry? Should I be deploying images instead of Dockerfiles?

2) The nginx setup I deployed exports the static html as a VOLUME, which the run command binds to a dir in my home dir, which I simply rsync when I want to update (i.e. the deployed site is outside the container). Should I have the content inside the container really?

3) I'm still using the 'default' site in nginx (currently sufficient). It would be kind of nice to have a Dockerfile in each site I wanted to deploy to the same host. But only one can get the port. I sort of want to have a 'foo.com' repo and a 'bar.org' repo and ship them both to the server as docker containers. Don't really see how to make that work.

What I think I want is:

- a repo has a Dockerfile and represents a service

- I can push these things around (git clone, scp a tgz, whatever) and have the containers "just run"

Not sure how to make that fit with "someone has to own port 80"

I have wanted this since Docker was announced last year. In my eyes the biggest gain of Docker for development over VMs is boot time. Now I can turn all my Vagrant VBoxes to Docker containers, and work much faster. Thanks to all the maintainers for the hard work.

Does Vagrant do any setup to allow you to run Docker within the dev container, say if you're working on a project that you wish to ship as a Docker container image?

1) Testing a Dockerfile, then scp'd it to the server, doesn't guarantee that it will build successfully on the server. However if you build successfully an image and push it to a repository - it will definitely work. Based on this, you can decide which one works for your setup. If you are on a production setup, I would say that you should use tested images, instead of hoping that the Dockerfile will build correctly.

3) As far as I understand your problem is that both containers would be running their own nginx, and would have to take port 80 for example. If this is what you mean, you could just EXPOSE port 80 from within the container, and it will automatically be mapped to a random port like 43152. Both containers would be mapped to different random ports (for example 43152 and 43153). You could then install Hipache and route different domain names/sites to different containers, essentially having Hipache proxy in front your Docker containers setup.

EDIT: There is also a project called Shipyard, which is Docker management... what I described above is called "Applications" inside Shipyard.

[0] https://github.com/shipyard/shipyard [1] https://github.com/dotcloud/hipache

Bit late to this game, but in theory would this let me do the following?

1. Set up a VM using CentOS to mimic my deployment environment

2. Distribute that to several people, including some running Windows and OSX, and have it automatically set up, with all parties reliably in exactly the same environment.