Using GNOME Keyring for Git Credentials on Fedora 25

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use the GNOME Keyring on Fedora 25 as a credential helper for Git. This post is very closely related to my earlier post on using GNOME Keyring as a Git credential helper on Ubuntu 16.04. As with the earlier Ubuntu-related post, what I’m including here isn’t new or ground-breaking information; I’m posting it primarily to make the information easier to find for others.

Like Ubuntu 16.04, Fedora 25 already has the basis for integrating GNOME Keyring into Git as a credential helper already installed into the /usr/share/doc/git-core-doc/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring directory.

Unlike Ubuntu 16.04, though, Fedora already has a compiled credential helper installed. This Git credential helper is found at /usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-gnome-keyring. This credential helper is ready to use.

To get GNOME Keyring support for storing Git credentials, then, all one has to do is simply configure Git appropriately (no need to install additional packages or compile anything). You can configure Git via a couple of different ways:

1. You can use the git config command, like this:

    git config --global credential.helper /usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-gnome-keyring
   

2. You can edit ~/.gitconfig directly, using the text editor of your choice. Add this text:

    [credential]
    helper  Continue reading

Introducing the Docker Community Directory and Docker Community Slack

Today, we’re thrilled to officially introduce the Docker Community Directory and Slack to further enable community building and collaboration. Our goal is to give everyone the opportunity to become a more informed and engaged member of the community by creating sub groups and channels based on location, language, use cases, interest in specific Docker-centric projects or initiatives.

Sign up for the Docker Community Directory and Slack

Docker Community Directory

Members who join the Docker Community Directory will benefit from the following:

• Latest product updates and release notes
• Targeted invitations and promo codes for Docker community events (DockerCon, Docker Summits, Meetups, Docker Partner events, trainings, workshops and hackathons)
• Ability to participate in raffles for Docker Swag
• Chance to get priority access to product betas
• Opportunity to get involved as a user and/or customer reference, meetup organizer, mentor, speaker, etc.
• Be listed on the Docker Community Directory without sharing your email (built in direct messaging system)
• Access to the Docker Community Slack

The Docker Community Directory is a tool for community members to collaborate. Everyone should use it respectfully, with genuine and specific Docker-centric messages. It should not be used to send messages that could be qualified as spam or otherwise violate Continue reading

What’s New in Docker Datacenter with Engine 1.12 – Demo Q&A

Last week we announced the latest release of Docker Datacenter (DDC) with Engine 1.12 integration, which includes Universal Control Plane (UCP) 2.0 and Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) 2.1. Now, IT operations teams can manage and secure their environment more effectively and developers can self-service select from an even more secure image base. Docker Datacenter with Engine 1.12 boasts improvements in orchestration and operations, end to end security (image signing, policy enforcement, mutual TLS encryption for clusters), enables Docker service deployments and includes an enhanced UI. Customers also have backwards compatibility for Swarm 1.x and Compose.

To showcase some of these new features we hosted a webinar where we provided an overview of Docker Datacenter, talked through some of the new features and showed a live demo of solution. Watch the recording of the webinar below:

We hosted a Q&A session at the end of the webinar and have included some of the most common audience questions  received.

Audience Q&A

Can I still deploy run and deploy my applications built with a previous Docker Engine version?

Yes. UCP 2.0 automatically sets up and manages a Swarm cluster alongside the native built-in swarm-mode Continue reading

Using GNOME Keyring as Git Credential Helper

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use the GNOME Keyring on Ubuntu 16.04 as a credential helper for Git. This post stems from my work in transitioning to Linux as my primary OS, an effort I’ve ratcheted up significantly in the last few weeks. What I’m including here isn’t new or ground-breaking information; I’m posting it primarily to make the information easier to find for others.

On Ubuntu 16.04, the basis for integrating GNOME Keyring into Git as a credential helper is already installed into the /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring directory. However, if you try to simply run sudo make in that directory, it will fail. In order to make it work, you must first install some additional development libraries:

sudo apt install libgnome-keyring-dev

Once you’ve installed this additional package, running sudo make in that directory will quickly compile a binary named git-credential-gnome-keyring. Once you have that binary, then you can configure Git to use GNOME Keyring as a credential helper. You can do this a couple of different ways:

1. You can use the git config command, like this:

    git config --global credential.helper /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring/git-credential-gnome-keyring
   

2. You can edit ~/.gitconfig directly, using the text editor of your Continue reading

Spousetivities at AWS re:Invent

For the first time ever, Spousetivities will be at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas! This means that IT pros traveling to Vegas can plan on bringing along their spouse, partner, significant other, or family member(s) and know that there are fun, safe, organized activities for them.

So what’s planned? Here’s a quick look:

• More cooking fun with Chef Phillip Dell, a previous season winner on Food Network’s “Chopped” show
• Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon tour (a must-see if you haven’t been before)
• Vegas food tour (hosted by Chef Dell, of course!)

As is a tradition with Spousetivities, participants in the activities have the chance to win prizes like iPads, Bose headphones, VR headsets, and lots of other goodies.

Crystal’s blog post on the Spousetivities site has a few more details, and registration is open right now.

Three Considerations for Planning your Docker Datacenter Deployment

Congratulations! You’ve decided to make the change your application environment with Docker Datacenter. You’re now on your way to greater agility, portability and control within your environment. But what do you need to get started? In this blog, we will cover things you need to consider (strategy, infrastructure, migration) to ensure a smooth POC and migration to production.

1. Strategy

Strategy involves doing a little work up-front to get everyone on the same page. This stage is critical to align expectations and set clear success criteria for exiting the project. The key focus areas are to determining your objective, plan out how to achieve it and know who should be involved.

Set the objective – This is a critical step as it helps to set clear expectations, define a use case and outline the success criteria for exiting a POC. A common objective is to enable developer productivity by implementing a Continuous Integration environment with Docker Datacenter.

Plan how to achieve it – With a clear use case and outcome identified, the next step is to look at what is required to complete this project. For a CI pipeline, Docker is able to standardize the development environment, provide isolation of the applications and their dependencies Continue reading

Technology Short Take #73

Welcome to Technology Short Take #73. Sorry for the long delay since the last Technology Short Take; personal matters have been taking quite the toll (if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know to what personal matters I’m referring). In any case, enough of that—here’s some data center-related content that I hope you find useful!

Networking

• Ansible has made some good progress in supporting network automation in the latest release (2.2), according to this blog post. This is an area where I hope to spend more time in the coming weeks before years’ end.
• Tomas Fojta shows how to use a PowerShell script to monitor the health of NSX Edge gateways.
• Jeremy Stretch mulls over the (perceived) problem of getting traffic into and out of overlay networks. I recommend reading this article, as well as reading the comments. Many commenters suggest just using L3 and having the hosts participate in a routing protocol like BGP, but as Jeremy points out many switches don’t have the capacity to handle that many routes. (Or, if they do, they’re quite expensive.) Seems like there’s this company in Palo Alto making a product that handles this issue pretty decently…(hint).
• Cumulus Continue reading

The Future of Automation

Automation is a hot topic. And the automation concept that has captured our imagination the most is the idea of self-driving cars. This is the kind of automation that we can see dramatically changing what we do everyday, within grasp in our lifetime.

The automotive industry, the press, and parents of 16 year-olds will tell you that the promise of self-driving cars is all about societal benefits: people make mistakes, people don’t always have the best information, and people have to drive with…other people. We can keep everybody safe if everybody just moves to self-driving cars.

But I believe that the benefits of automation are actually much more personal. It’s about getting your life back. Let’s let the computers do the tasks that are mundane and that we shouldn’t be spending time on - like waiting in traffic - so that way we can focus on the things that are important to us.

Automation is intensely personal. It’s not necessarily for the organization, although it it does help. And it’s not just for efficiency’s sake or business sake. At the end of the day, it’s really about helping people.

Automation sometimes gets a bad rap because people think, “Well, if I automate my Continue reading

Get to Know the Docker Datacenter Networking Updates

The latest release of Docker Datacenter (DDC) on Docker Engine 1.12 brings many new networking features that were designed with service discovery and high availability in mind. As organizations continue their journey towards modernizing legacy apps and microservices architectures, these new features were created to address modern day infrastructure demands. DDC builds on and extends the built-in orchestration capabilities including declarative services, scheduling, networking and security features of Engine 1.12. In addition to these new features, we published a new Reference Architecture to help guide you in designing and implementing this for your unique application requirements.

Among the new features in DDC are:

• DNS for service discovery
• Automatic internal service load balancing
• Cluster-wide transport-layer (L4) load balancing
• Cluster-wide application-layer (L7) load balancing using the new HTTP Routing Mesh (HRM) experimental feature

When creating a microservice architecture where services are often decoupled and communicated using APIs, there is an intrinsic need for many of these services to know how to communicate with each other. If a new service is created, how will it know where to find the other services it needs to communicate with? As a service needs to be scaled, what mechanism can be used for Continue reading

DockerCon Returns to Europe in 2017

DockerCon is making its return to Europe next year! DockerCon Europe will be held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark at Bella Center Cope
nhagen from October 16 – October 18, 2017. We plan on opening the week on Monday, October 16 with paid trainings and workshops, then General Session will kick off the conference the morning of Tuesday October 17 and the conference will continue through Wednesday October 18.

Three reasons why we are excited about DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen

• On behalf of the entire Docker team, it’s safe to say that we cannot wait to reunite with the Docker Community in Europe under one roof again! Local Docker Meetup chapters take place every week to fuel the community enthusiasm, but there is something special about coming together for DockerCon and collaborating, learning and networking as a big group.

• Recently remodeled in 2014/2015, the Bella Center Copenhagen is an ultra-modern event space featuring Scandinavian design throughout including open space with lots of indoor greenery. Bella Center Copenhagen is also one of the most sustainable venues in the world. They practice waste sorting in 16 categories, have an 850 kW wind turbine on-site for energy, as well as Continue reading

Exciting news from CheConf

Eclipse Che is a developer workspace server and cloud IDE. With Che, you can define a workspace with the project code files and all of their dependencies necessary to edit, build, run, and debug them. You can share your workspaces with other team members. And Che drives Codenvy, cloud workspaces for development teams, with access control and other features.

Today in the keynote at CheConf 2016, Tyler Jewell made several Docker related announcements.

1. Che runs on your machine as a Docker container, and generates other containers for workspaces making it a fully Dockerized IDE.
2. Docker now powers the Che CLI, including most Che utilities like IP lookup, curl, compiling Che, versioning, launching.
3. Che has added support for Docker Compose files in workspaces, making it really easy to write and debug Compose-based applications, right in Che.
4. Che agents, such as SSH or language servers for intellisense, are deployed as containers.
5. Chedir is a command line utility for converting source repos into Dockerized workspaces.
6. Che is now available in the Docker Store.
7. Codenvy is packaged as a set of Docker containers. With docker-compose up you start up ten docker containers that run Codenvy on your network.
8. Codenvy Continue reading

Introducing Image Signing Policy in Docker Datacenter

My colleague colleague Ying Li and I recently blogged about Securing the Software Supply Chain and drew the analogy between traditional physical supply chains and the creation, building, and deployment involved in a software supply chain. We believe that a software pipeline that can be verified at every stage is an important step in raising the security bar for all software, and we didn’t stop at simply presenting the idea.

Integrated Content Trust and Image Signing Policy

In the recent release of Docker Datacenter,  we announced a new feature that starts to brings these security capabilities together along the software supply chain. Built on Notary, a signing infrastructure based on The Update Framework (TUF), along with Docker Content Trust (DCT), an integration of the Notary toolchain into the Docker client, DDC now allows administrators to set up signing policies that prevent untrusted content from being deployed.

In this release of DDC, the Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) now also ships with integrated Notary services. This means you’re ready to start using DCT and the new Signing Policy features out of the box! No separate server and database to install, configure and connect to the registry.

Bringing it all together

Image Continue reading

Docker Datacenter adds enterprise orchestration, security policy and refreshed UI

Today we are excited to introduce new additions to Docker Datacenter, our Container as a Service (CaaS) platform for enterprise IT and application teams. Docker Datacenter provides an integrated platform for developers and IT operations teams to collaborate securely on the application lifecycle. Built on the foundation of Docker Engine, Docker Datacenter (DDC) also provides integrated orchestration, management and security around managing resources like access, images, applications, networks and more across the cluster.

This latest release of Docker Datacenter includes a number of new features and improvements focused in the following areas:

• Enterprise orchestration and operations to make running and operating multi container applications simple, secure and scalable
• Integrated end to end security to cover all of the components and people that interact with the application pipeline
• User experience and performance improvements ensure that even the most complex operations are handled efficiently

Let’s dig into some of the new features.

Enterprise orchestration with backward compatibility

This release of Docker Datacenter not only integrates the built in orchestration capabilities of Docker Engine 1.12 utilizing swarm mode and services, but also provides backwards compatibility for standalone containers using the docker run commands. To help enterprise application teams migrate, it is important Continue reading

Docker Online Meetup #46: Introduction to InfraKit

In case you missed it, Solomon Hykes (Docker Founder and CTO) open sourced InfraKit during his keynote address at LinuxCon Europe in Berlin last month. InfraKit is a declarative management toolkit for orchestrating infrastructure built by two Docker core team engineers, David Chung and Bill Farner. Read this blog post to learn more about InfraKit origins, internals and plugins including groups, instances and flavors.

 There are many ways you can participate in the development of the project and influence the roadmap:

• Star the project on GitHub to follow issues and development
• Help define and implement new and interesting plugins
• Instance plugins to support different infrastructure providers
• Flavor plugins to support a variety of systems like etcd or mysql clusters
• Group controller plugins like metrics-driven auto scaling and more
• Help define interfaces and implement new infrastructure resource types for things like load balancers, networks and storage volume provisioners

Check out the InfraKit repository README for more info, a quick tutorial and to start experimenting — from plain files to Terraform integration to building a Zookeeper Continue reading

Docker at Tech Field Day 12

Docker will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12, and you can sit in on the sessions – at least virtually.

Tech Field Day is an opportunity for IT practitioners to hear from some of the leading technology companies, and Docker is excited to be participating again. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth for cultivating a vibrant community of technical leaders and evangelists and inviting us to participate. Looking forward to meeting more of the delegates.

Our session will be Wednesday, November 16th, from 4:30 to 6:30pm Pacific. We have a full slate of topics including:

• Docker Datacenter: What is Docker Datacenter and how can it help organizations implement their own Container as a Service platform.
• Docker for Windows Server: An overview of the integration of Docker containers and Windows Server 2016.
• Docker for AWS and Docker for Azure: Learn about the easiest way to deploy and manage clusters of Docker hosts on both Azure and AWS.
• Docker Security: We’ll discuss how to implement a secure software supply chain with Docker.
• Docker Networking: A conversation on how Docker allows developers to define container centric networks that run on top of your existing infrastructure.

Continue reading

New Dockercast episode and interview with Docker Captain Laura Frank

We recently had the opportunity to catch up with the amazing Laura Frank. Laura is a developer focused on making tools for other developers.As an engineer at Codeship, she works on improving the Docker infrastructure and overall experience for users on Codeship. Previously, she worked on several open source projects to support Docker in the early stages of the project, including Panamax and ImageLayers. She currently lives in Berlin.

Laura is also a Docker Captain, a distinction that Docker awards select members of the community that are experts in their field and passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others.

As we do with all of these podcasts, we begin with a little bit of history of “How did you get here?” Then we dive into the Codeship offering and how it optimizes its delivery flow by using Docker containers for everything.  We then end up with a “What’s the coolest Docker story you have?”  I hope you enjoy  – please feel free to comment and leave suggestions.

In addition to the questions covered in the podcast, we’ve had the chance to ask Laura for a couple additional questions below.

How has Docker impacted what you Continue reading

An Introduction to the VirtualBox CLI

This post provides a basic introduction to the VirtualBox CLI (command-line interface) tool, vboxmanage. This post does not attempt to replace the comprehensive documentation; rather, its purpose is to help users who are new to vboxmanage (such as myself, having recently adopted VirtualBox for my Vagrant environments) get somewhat up to speed as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Basic Commands

Let’s start with some basic operations. Here are a few to get you started:

• To list all the registered VMs, simply run vboxmanage list vms. Note that if you are using Vagrant with VirtualBox, this command will also show VirtualBox VMs that have been instantiated by Vagrant. Similarly, if you are using Docker Machine with VirtualBox, this command will show you VMs created by Docker Machine.

• To list all the running VMs, use vboxmanage list runningvms.

• To start a VM, run vboxmanage startvm <name or UUID>. You can optionally specify a --type parameter to control how the VM is started. Using --type gui will show it via the host GUI; using --type headless means you’ll need to interact over the network (typically via SSH). To emulate Vagrant/Docker Machine-like behavior, you’d use --type headless.

• Once a VM is Continue reading

Thinking Out Loud: The Future of Kubernetes

I’ve just wrapped up KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2016 in Seattle, WA. There’s no doubt the Kubernetes community is active and engaged, and the project itself is charging forward. As both the community and the project grow, though, what does that mean for the future of Kubernetes?

Here are my thoughts, hopefully presented in a somewhat logical fashion.

It seems to me that Kubernetes has been successful thus far because of a strong focus on the problem it’s trying to solve. You can see this in the Kubernetes web site, where phrases like “Production-Grade Container Orchestration” and “Automated container deployment, scaling, and management” are found. You can see this in the API abstractions Kubernetes uses (a pod as a group of co-located containers, a service as a stable access point for sets of pods, etc.). You can see it in the real-world customer deployments and use cases. Kubernetes seems focused on addressing the needs of container-based microservices-centric application architectures.

However, there now seem to be some efforts to push Kubernetes to support other types of applications as well. One could look at DaemonSets (which are used to ensure that a particular pod is always running on every node; useful for “infrastructure” services Continue reading

Voting with Docker: A little break from the election

You may have heard, there’s an election for president (and many other posts) going on in the US today. For those who already voted, who want a break from voting, or just want to create a new quiz for their friends, we have the Docker Example Voting App. And we’ve even created a poll to help you figure out the best quiz to make.

The voting app was created to showcase a number of features of Docker:

1. Polyglot development environments: The app has Python, Node.js, and .NET code, as well as Redis and Postgres services.
2. Easy deployment of a multi-service app with Docker Compose.
3. Easy Docker Networking.

All this using a simple $ docker-compose up.

The Example Voting App has been really popular at Docker events like the Docker 3rd birthday, and in our Docker Labs repository, which has a lot of example applications and tutorials. And recently, Docker Captain Alex Ellis ported the app to Windows Containers using:

• IIS
• ASP.NET
• .NET 4.5.1
• Microsoft SQL Server (2016)

So if you want a break from the election, check out our poll Continue reading

Docker San Francisco Meetup #50: Swarm Mode

Last Wednesday was Docker’s 50th meetup in San Francisco! There was an awesome turnout from the local Docker community to see Docker’s own Nishant Totla and Dongluo Chen and their talk on Swarm Mode.

Nishant and Dongluo gave a talk entitled ‘Using Docker Swarm Mode and healthchecks to Deploy Applications Without Loss’ where they demonstrated how to do service upgrades without impacting your application.

They explained that Docker swarm mode enables users to manage their applications with service primitives and the healthcheck feature provides health indications for a container. Coming up in the Docker 1.13 release, Docker Swarm can connect healthcheck results with load balancers to implement no-loss service upgrade. Check out the talk including Nishant’s demo in the video below.

Want to learn more about the Docker platform and Docker’s open source projects?

• Join us for the next Docker Online Meetup (Wed, Nov 9th at 9:30am PST)  with Bill Farner and David Chung covering InfraKit: A toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure.
• Save your seat for our next webinar on Docker Datacenter (Wed, Nov 16th at 10am PST) and learn how it enables enterprise application teams to embrace cloud strategies, application modernization and DevOps.

New blog post w/ Continue reading