Machine makes it really easy to create Docker hosts on your computer, on cloud providers and inside your own data center. It creates servers, installs Docker on them, then configures the Docker client to talk to them.

It works a bit like this:

$ docker-machine create -d virtualbox dev
INFO[0000] Creating SSH key...
INFO[0000] Creating VirtualBox VM...
INFO[0007] Starting VirtualBox VM...
INFO[0007] Waiting for VM to start...
INFO[0041] "dev" has been created and is now the active machine.
INFO[0041] To point your Docker client at it, run this in your shell: eval "$(docker-machine env dev)"

$ docker-machine ls
NAME   ACTIVE   DRIVER       STATE     URL                         SWARM
dev    *        virtualbox   Running   tcp://192.168.99.127:2376

$ eval "$(docker-machine env dev)"

$ docker run busybox echo hello world
Unable to find image 'busybox:latest' locally
511136ea3c5a: Pull complete
df7546f9f060: Pull complete
ea13149945cb: Pull complete
4986bf8c1536: Pull complete
hello world

$ docker-machine create -d digitalocean --digitalocean-access-token=secret staging
INFO[0000] Creating SSH key...
INFO[0001] Creating Digital Ocean droplet...
INFO[0002] Waiting for SSH...
INFO[0070] Configuring Machine...
INFO[0109] "staging" has been created and is now the active machine.
INFO[0109] To point your Docker client at it, run this in your shell: eval "$(docker-machine env staging)"

$ docker-machine ls
NAME      ACTIVE   DRIVER         STATE     URL                          SWARM
dev                virtualbox     Running   tcp://192.168.99.127:2376
staging   *        digitalocean   Running   tcp://104.236.253.181:2376

Full documentation is available here.

Want to hack on Machine? Docker's contributions guidelines apply.

The requirements to build Machine are:

1. A running instance of Docker
2. The bash shell

To build, run:

$ script/build

From the Machine repository's root. Machine will run the build inside of a Docker container and the compiled binaries will appear in the project directory on the host.

By default, Machine will run a build which cross-compiles binaries for a variety of architectures and operating systems. If you know that you are only compiling for a particular architecture and/or operating system, you can speed up compilation by overriding the default argument that the build script passes to gox. This is very useful if you want to iterate quickly on a new feature, bug fix, etc.

For instance, if you only want to compile for use on OSX with the x86_64 arch, run:

$ script/build -osarch="darwin/amd64"

If you have any questions we're in #docker-machine on Freenode.

To run the unit tests for the whole project, using the following script:

$ script/test

This will run the unit tests inside of a container, so you don't have to worry about configuring your environment properly before doing so.

To run the unit tests for only a specific subdirectory of the project, you can pass an argument to that script to specify which directory, e.g.:

$ script/test ./drivers/amazonec2

If you make a pull request, it is highly encouraged that you submit tests for the code that you have added or modified in the same pull request.

Machine includes a script to check for missing *_test.go files and to generate an HTML-based repesentation of which code is covered by tests.

To run the code coverage script, execute:

$ ./script/coverage serve

You will see the results of the code coverage check as they come in.

This will also generate the code coverage website and serve it from a container on port 8000. By default, / will show you the source files from the base directory, and you can navigate to the coverage for any particular subdirectory of the Docker Machine repo's root by going to that path. For instance, to see the coverage for the VirtualBox driver's package, browse to /drivers/virtualbox.

You can hit CTRL+C to stop the server.

We utilize BATS for integration testing. This runs tests against the generated binary. To use, make sure to install BATS (use that link). Then run ./script/build to generate the binary. Once you have the binary, you can run test against a specified driver:

$ bats test/integration/driver-virtualbox.bats
 ✓ virtualbox: machine should not exist
 ✓ virtualbox: VM should not exist
 ✓ virtualbox: create
 ✓ virtualbox: active
 ✓ virtualbox: ls
 ✓ virtualbox: run busybox container 
 ✓ virtualbox: url
 ✓ virtualbox: ip
 ✓ virtualbox: ssh
 ✓ virtualbox: stop
 ✓ virtualbox: machine should show stopped
 ✓ virtualbox: start
 ✓ virtualbox: machine should show running after start
 ✓ virtualbox: restart
 ✓ virtualbox: machine should show running after restart
 ✓ virtualbox: remove
 ✓ virtualbox: machine should not exist
 ✓ virtualbox: VM should not exist

15 tests, 0 failures

You can also run the general cli tests:

$ bats test/integration/cli.bats
 ✓ cli: show info
 ✓ cli: show active help
 ✓ cli: show config help
 ✓ cli: show inspect help
 ✓ cli: show ip help
 ✓ cli: show kill help
 ✓ cli: show ls help
 ✓ cli: show restart help
 ✓ cli: show rm help
 ✓ cli: show env help
 ✓ cli: show ssh help
 ✓ cli: show start help
 ✓ cli: show stop help
 ✓ cli: show upgrade help
 ✓ cli: show url help
 ✓ flag: show version
 ✓ flag: show help

17 tests, 0 failures