Recently I've been working on libmachine and I wanted to show off some of what it can do.

moby is a little toy program that takes the same trick docker-compose does with containers, and starts to apply it towards machines that run docker.

The dependencies are vendored so you just need to:

$ make

No fancy container stuff unfortunately, so you need to have Go installed.

It will spit out moby binary.

I have used a custom branch of libmachine so sorry if it is a little hard to follow the dependencies.

Define a moby.yml file, such as the one included in this repository, it should look like this:

hostoptions:
  engineoptions:
    storagedriver: aufs
    labels:
      - foo=bar
      - baz=quux
      - far=go
    arbitraryflags:
      - dns=8.8.8.8
driveroptions:
  accesstoken: <token>
  region: sfo1
  size: 2gb

The keys current map very directly to internal libmachine stuff, and loosely to the command line flags that you may be familiar with through Docker Machine.

Currently digitalocean is the only provider which is supported so it's implied that driveroptions refers to that.

Eventually all drivers, and hopefully a variety of different resource types, will be supported, and the YAML keys will be cleaned up. I'd like to integrate it into Docker Machine proper or a related project.

When you have your settings done, just:

$ ./moby up

And you will see the pretty output as the machine gets created, Docker gets installed and configured, etc. The machine store will appear as a local directory. You can interact with the created machine (mobydick) with the normal docker-machine client by specifying that as store path, like so:

$ docker-machine -s store ls

Now, here is the fun bit: What if we decided after the fact that we want to change a Docker daemon options, like set --log-driver=syslog instead of json-file? moby can do that without you having to re-create your whole instance.

You can change the YAML:

hostoptions:
  engineoptions:
    storagedriver: aufs
    labels:
      - foo=bar
      - baz=quux
      - far=go
    arbitraryflags:
      - dns=8.8.8.8
      - log-driver=syslog
driveroptions:
  accesstoken: <token>
  region: sfo1
  size: 2gb

Then run, ./moby apply. It will go out and change the Docker daemon settings for you!

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, but swarmoptions is a supported key too :D

This is very much just a toy and not meant for any real kinds of usage, only hacking fun. But, someday the foundations presented here as POC I hope will make it upstream and become a very, very useful tool for folks doing Real Stuff. For instance, I think the Virtualbox configuration / usage experience could be way better with Machine than it is today. I want to use such a YAML to define all of your Compose files that you want to run automatically, different types of shares so the VirtualBox shared folders can be replaced and/or manipulated more effectively, and so on. Then, you can pass around a little moby.yml (or equivalent) to your team and the workflow is much easier, like Vagrant's.