Use Docker to Try Pulp

Using Docker, you can now easily and quickly stand up a demo deployment of Pulp. Excluding the time it takes Docker to download the images, it takes only a few seconds to have a brand new deployment running.

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pulp/packaging/docker/dockerfiles/centos/start.sh
$ sudo source start.sh /path/to/lots/of/storage/

The README explains a variety of security and other concerns that prevent this containerization of pulp from being production-worthy. But it is a great way to try Pulp for the first time, try a new release, or experiment with new features in a throw-away environment.

I’ve been using these Docker images for a few months to do demos, reproduce bugs, and verify that each Pulp process can be run in isolation. They’ve been very stable and easy to work with, but let me know what your experience is.

The images themselves are built on CentOS 7. You have the best chance at a good experience if you run them on a distribution in the Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora “family”, but I have also had success running them on Ubuntu. There were a couple of hurdles to overcome (for example, for reasons I don’t understand, qpid’s persistent message store would not work), and I am interested to know if you encounter any problems running these images on a different distribution.

Just run the start.sh script mentioned in the README, and it will get everything configured and running. Then you can log in and start using it. The following shows an rpm sync, which under-the-hood makes use of a container running apache, and at least two containers running worker processes:

$ sudo docker run -it --rm --link pulpapi:pulpapi pulp/admin-client bash
[root@6610af58a341 /]# pulp-admin login -u admin
Enter password:
Successfully logged in. Session certificate will expire at May 19 02:50:16 2015 GMT.

[root@6610af58a341 /]# pulp-admin rpm repo create --repo-id=zoo --feed=https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/pulp/pulp/demo_repos/zoo/
Successfully created repository [zoo]

[root@6610af58a341 /]# pulp-admin rpm repo sync run --repo-id=zoo
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Synchronizing Repository [zoo]
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

This command may be exited via ctrl+c without affecting the request.

Downloading metadata...
[|]
... completed

Downloading repository content...
[==================================================] 100%
RPMs: 32/32 items
Delta RPMs: 0/0 items

... completed

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