Rob Ferguson

Docker on the Raspberry Pi

Rob Ferguson -

How do you take care of provisioning, configuration management, deployment, logging & monitoring, real-time analytics and workflow automation for your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)?

And, what if your VPC was a Raspberry Pi cluster?

For me the first step was getting Docker up and running on a Raspberry Pi Machine Image (RPiMI). Right now, there are already several options:

HypriotOS

I downloaded Jack, the latest version of the HypriotOS and extracted the RPiMI (hypriot-rpi-20150329-140334.img) using the Archive Utility (on my MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite).

Then, I used Pi Filler to copy (it took less than 2 minutes) the RPiMI to my micro SD card.

Now, you can insert the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi and while it's booting up you'll notice a red LED light up and next to it a flashing green LED. You may also notice the green LED flashing a bit more than usual, that's because HypriotOS is resizing the file system and then restarting the operating system.

The HypriotOS includes the Avahi demon so you can use the images default hostname, 'black-pearl' (with a '.local' suffix) to connect to your Pi: ssh pi@black-pearl.local (the default password is 'raspberry').

Note: You can also login as a privileged user: ssh root@black-pearl.local (the default password is 'hypriot').

The best way to understand Docker is to try it, start by checking the version:

Then, take a look at the Docker Cheat Sheet on GitHub.

You might also like to try the Hypriot version of Kitematic:

References: