Helios is a Docker orchestration platform for deploying and managing containers across an entire fleet.

# Create an nginx job using the nginx container image, exposing it on the host on port 8080
$ helios create nginx:v1 nginx:1.7.1 -p http=80:8080

# Check that the job is listed
$ helios jobs

# List helios hosts
$ helios hosts

# Deploy the nginx job on one of the hosts
$ helios deploy nginx:v1 <host>

# Check the job status
$ helios status

# Curl the nginx container when it's started running
$ curl <host>:8080

# Undeploy the nginx job
$ helios undeploy -a nginx:v1

# Remove the nginx job
$ helios remove nginx:v1

We at Spotify are running this in production now (as of early July 2014) with a money-generating service, so we trust it. Whether you should trust it to not cause smoking holes in your infrastructure is up to you.

If you're looking for how to use Helios, see the docs directory. Most probably the User Manual is what you're looking for.

If you're looking for how to download, build, install and run Helios, keep reading.

• Docker 1.0 or newer
• Zookeeper 3.4.0 or newer

You can download Debian packages from our releases page. Though if you want to build it yourself, the process described below is the same process that generates those packages.

First, make sure you have Docker installed locally. If you're using OS X, you can use the included Vagrantfile to bring up Docker inside of a VM:

$ vagrant up

# set DOCKER_HOST to use the Docker instance inside the VM
$ export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.33.10:2375

Actually building Helios and running its tests should be a simple matter of running:

$ mvn clean test

If you have Vagrant installed locally, just run:

$ vagrant up

This will start a virtual machine, install the prereqs, build the project, and install and run the Helios agent and master. You can then use the Vagrant environment:

$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@ubuntu-14:~$ helios hosts
HOST             STATUS    DEPLOYED    RUNNING    CPUS    MEM     LOAD AVG    MEM USAGE    OS       VERSION
192.168.33.10    Down      0           0          2       0 gb    0.09        0.81         Linux    3.13.0-24-generic

Note that the included Vagrantfile doesn't run the test suite when building Helios. This is so we can get you up and running with a VM as quickly as possible. You should run mvn package yourself to run the test suite.

The launcher scripts are in bin/. After you've run mvn package, you should be able to start the agent and master:

$ bin/helios-master &
$ bin/helios-agent &

If you see any issues, make sure you have the prerequisites (Docker and Zookeeper) installed.

You can install the downloaded Debian packages as mentioned above, or you can build them yourself.

Running mvn package generates Debian packages that you can install on your servers. For example:

$ mvn package
...
$ find . -name "*.deb"
./helios-services/target/helios-agent_0.0.27-SNAPSHOT_all.deb
./helios-services/target/helios-master_0.0.27-SNAPSHOT_all.deb
./helios-services/target/helios-services_0.0.27-SNAPSHOT_all.deb
./helios-tools/target/helios_0.0.27-SNAPSHOT_all.deb

The Debian package in the helios-tools directory contains the Helios CLI tool.

The helios-services Debian package is a shared dependency of both the agent and the master. Install it and either the helios-agent or helios-master Debian package on each agent and master, respectively.

To run findbugs on the helios codebase, do mvn clean compile site. This will build helios and then run an analysis, emitting reports in helios-*/target/site/findbugs.html.

To silence an irrelevant warning, add a filter match along with a justification in findbugs-exclude.xml.

The sources for the Helios master and agent are under helios-services. The CLI source is under helios-tools. The Helios Java client is under helios-client.

The main meat of the Helios agent is in Supervisor.java, which revolves around the lifecycle of managing individual running Docker containers.

For the master, the HTTP response handlers are in src/main/java/com/spotify/helios/master/resources.

Interactions with ZooKeeper for the agent and master are mainly in ZookeeperAgentModel.java and ZooKeeperMasterModel.java, respectively.

The Helios services use Dropwizard which is a bundle of Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, Yammer Metrics, Guava, Logback and other Java libraries.

# Run tests and create a tagged release commit
./release.sh

# Push it
./push-release.sh