Mastodawn

🦆Jun 4, 2023

Anyone else struggle to understand #docker ? As someone who doesn't use it for any work-related reason, it seems completely unapproachable.

I just ran into the first project I'm very interested in which is *only available in docker*, and requires configuration changes before it can run. Every tutorial I can find feels literally like hieroglyphics.

Once docker is installed, it feels like implementation by obfuscation. Everything is just invisible so there is no clear way to do anything. If you run it, and it doesn't work, it's completely opaque. I pull down an image, no idea where it goes. No idea where to edit the yaml files. Been googling for an hour and nothing has helped.

I've been using #Linux now for 23 years and this is easily the stupidest I've ever felt.

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Officially Tara 🕷️

🌹Jun 4, 2023

@raineer it is truly nonobvious. it took me a while of working with it at work and having patient coworkers who already understood it explaining things on demand before i was comfortable with it.

one thing that might help some confusion is that Dockerfiles (which i think is what you mean by yaml config) don't exist after you've built the image - it's the input to build the image.

`docker images` will list the already downloaded images.

if you want to run an interactive container (a running instance of an image is a "container"), then you

`docker run --rm -it imagename:tagname` (replacing imagename and tagname with your image and tag)

--rm tells it to clean up when the container exits, -i says make it interactive, -t allocates a tty (and you can combine the single letter flags to -it).

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Officially Tara 🕷️

🌹

@raineer if you need to maker customizations to the image, you'll need to make your own image based on the existing image, by writing your own Dockerfile in its own directory and then running "docker build -t IMAGENAME:TAGNAME ." (replacing image and tag name)

then you can run the docker run command from earlier but with your new image:tag name