Kitematic – The easiest way to start using Docker on your Mac

Kitematic – The easiest way to start using Docker on your Mac(kitematic.com)

155 points by alpacaaa 11 years ago | 47 comments

mchiang 11 years ago |

One of the creators of Kitematic here. Our github repo is here: https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic

chanux 11 years ago | |

Nicely done. Nice name too.

One could use such a nice UI on linux too ;)

PS: I don't want a nice UI. There sure are others who would.

alpacaaa 11 years ago | |

This is awesome dude, thanks for open sourcing it.

notduncansmith 11 years ago |

Great work, guys! I just wanted to let everyone know that there's a HipChat support room[1] for this project, the creators are there and super helpful. Jeffrey and Michael definitely just set a new bar for open-source project support.

[1] https://www.hipchat.com/giAT9Fqb5

thejosh 11 years ago | |

What's wrong with IRC? :)

notduncansmith 11 years ago | | |

Nothing really, though I've personally never had a great experience with IRC (not the medium's fault of course). I was remarking more on the enthusiasm and helpfulness of the team.

mchiang 11 years ago | |

Thanks! Sean's pushing out troubleshooting docs so everyone can view them on our docs page [ http://kitematic.com/docs/known-issue-fixes/ ]

hibbelig 11 years ago |

I wish it wasn't necessary to use a VM to run Docker on a Mac. Shouldn't it be easy to get Jails running on OSX, and wouldn't that be a good basis for Docker? (I'm not sure.)

jpgvm 11 years ago | |

You still have the issue of not having an implementation of an Ethernet or network virtualisation features like Crossbow/VImage.

Even if you were to solve that you would be stuck with the VFS graph driver unless you could get a CoW filesystem up and running on OSX (maybe revamp the old ZFS port?).

Docker is much more than just jailing is basically the problem.

justincormack 11 years ago | |

Well first of all Apple has shown no interest in adding jails to osx. Second, there is not yet a proof of concept implementation of Docker using jails (there are significant differences between the implementation of jails and Linux namespacing). Third, you need a filesystem like zfs, but Apple does not support that. Fourth, all Docker code currently being distributed is for Linux/amd64.

Implementing it on FreeBSD would be immensely easier as a first step.

stuaxo 11 years ago | |

Docker is built on linux containers (lxc)

toomuchcpu 11 years ago |

My MacBookPro's fans start running right after I launch this.

Activity Monitor shows that the node-helper process is eating up no less than 20% cpu, even when no apps are active.

(are all Meteor apps like this?)

This looks nice but unless you can fix that I'm just going to stick with using Docker on OSX the hard way.

zek 11 years ago | |

I find that I have a similar issue with all node apps on my Macbook Pro

benologist 11 years ago |

This is great and I've been wanting to try out Docker for a while. Here's some feedback:

1) I had to delete my existing host-only networks

2) Images could be pre-populated with popular images so you're only a click away from getting started with an app. As a first-time docker user I don't have any of that stuff lying around.

Edited to add:

3) A progress indicator would be great creating/starting apps and images

4) am I supposed to install docker separately to access the command line tools?

mchiang 11 years ago |

In case you're having installer issues: https://kitematic.com/docs/known-issue-fixes/

If that doesn't fix, please submit a bug report: https://kitematic.com/docs/help-us-debug/

Feel free to jump in our support chat as well.

Sorry for the trouble. We're working on a fix.

mchiang 11 years ago | |

No installation step should take over 1 minute. If it's more than that, there is probably an error.

fishnchips 11 years ago |

Great idea, unfortunately in my case the setup phase gets stuck on 'Setting up the default Kinematic images...'.

mchiang 11 years ago | |

Hey,

Kitematic seems to have a conflict with older versions of boot2docker at the moment. We're still looking into this issue.

In the meantime, some of our users have found success in doing this:

1. In the terminal run boot2docker delete 2. Open Virtualbox and delete the boot2docker vm 3. Delete all the host-only networks under VirtualBox=>Preferences=>Network=>Host-only networks tab 4. Run the installer again

Sorry about all the trouble. We're looking into fixes.

Elesant 11 years ago | |

Hey, developer of Kitematic here. We have added a page for fixes on known issues: http://kitematic.com/docs/known-issue-fixes/

Let me know if it works! Feel free to hop in our HipChat support as well. :)

nXqd 11 years ago |

As a devops user, this would be not so useful. It was my first thought when I saw this. But, wait a minute, if this can replace MAMP, or XAMPP, it would be great. It will help the new user get the development environment setting up in no time, isolated environment and beautiful application. It would be a win.

Nice work !

lfx 11 years ago | |

For the same reason I use Vagrant. I would like to hear why would anybody use Docker instead of Vagrant and vice versa?

mikeflynn 11 years ago | | |

One difference is that Vagrant is a full stand-alone server VM rather than a shared container like Docker, so Vagrant is better for housing multiple services in a single Vagrant instance, while Docker is better off housing a single-use application/service.

Example: If you wanted to run a complex local dev environment with apache, mysql, memcache, varnish, etc... You could run that all in a single large VM (provisioned and booted by Vagrant) or by multiple Docker containers (one for each service).

chanux 11 years ago | | |

I don't know about OS X but on Linux Docker is so much better than Vagrant (not really, it's the VMs). But that's just my opinion.

dominotw 11 years ago |

Isn't this( http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/) the easiest way to use docker on a mac? Its just 3 shell commands and an installer.

I am not clear what kitematic is exactly. A UI on top of docker?

mchiang 11 years ago | |

Pretty much just a GUI in our beta. We do some things special like:

- Automatically creates a folder under ~/Kitematic for each Volume.

- One click NSEnter into any container.

- Any container can be accessed at <container_name>.dev (automatically sets up a DNS for you, so you can connect a database too using that URL).

We're really just trying to make Docker easier to use for Mac right now. More will come.

Smudge 11 years ago | | |

Does your `.dev` container access conflict with users of pow.cx? Is that configurable?

noazark 11 years ago | | |

Hadn't seen the DNS feature yet, that is amazingly useful! Thank you for that.

noazark 11 years ago | |

The tagline does seem to be marketing jargon, good for them. I'm seasoned with the docker CLI and I still think this is awesome, a UI on top of docker. Mostly it means that I can convince my teammates (who, for example, heavily use GitHub for Mac) to dive into docker without whining.

StavrosK 11 years ago |

Aw what! Why is this OS X only? :-(

EDIT: Never mind, forgot I had a mac.

notduncansmith 11 years ago | |

It solves a very specific problem - using Docker on OS X is a giant pain. It's pretty easy on something like Ubuntu, but for Mac the typical solution involves Vagrant + a VM, so startup times are slow, it eats a lot of memory and CPU, etc.

mrinterweb 11 years ago | | |

I disagree that "using Docker on OS X is a giant pain". I don't really see how this is more than a GUI that works with boot2docker and docker. Kitematic appears to be using boot2docker under the hood. I think using boot2docker is very simple. Once boot2docker is running, as far as I can tell, using docker is the same experience people have on linux.

bboreham 11 years ago | | |

It looks like Kitematic uses VirtualBox, a VM.

Aside from the GUI, how does it differ from Boot2Docker, which is what the Docker web site tells you to use on a Mac?

StavrosK 11 years ago | | |

Oh, thanks, I thought it was an image manager (which I could use). I guess you'd have a problem with Docker on OS X, given the BSD-based kernel...

digitalsanctum 11 years ago |

Is there a roadmap of what's to come? How about linking containers?

mchiang 11 years ago | |

Linking containers is definitely something we're looking into for the future.

In this release, there is environment variable support in settings.

pearknob 11 years ago |

Great job. I love tools that make things dead simple :)

rodrigoavie 11 years ago |

Thanks!