This is a small Docker recipe to build nsenter
easily and install it in your
system.
It is a small tool allowing to enter
into n
ames
paces. Technically,
it can enter existing namespaces, or spawn a process into a new set of
namespaces. "What are those namespaces you're blabbering about?"
We are talking about container namespaces.
nsenter
can do many useful things, but the main reason why I'm so
excited about it is because it lets you enter into a Docker container.
This is because my preferred distros (Debian and Ubuntu) ship with an
outdated version of util-linux
(the package that should contain nsenter
).
Therefore, if you need nsenter
on those distros, you have to juggle with
APT repository, or compile from source, or⦠Ain't nobody got time for that.
I'm going to make a very bold assumption: if you landed here, it's because
you want to enter a Docker container. Therefore, you won't mind if my
method to build nsenter
uses Docker itself.
If you want to install nsenter
into /usr/local/bin
, just do this:
docker run --rm -v /usr/local/bin:/target jpetazzo/nsenter
The jpetazzo/nsenter
container will detect that /target
is a
mountpoint, and it will copy the nsenter
binary into it.
If you don't trust me, and prefer to extract the nsenter
binary,
rather than allowing my container to potentially wreak havoc into
your system's $PATH
, you can also do this:
docker run --rm jpetazzo/nsenter cat /nsenter > /tmp/nsenter
Then do whatever you want with the binary in /tmp/nsenter
.
First, figure out the PID of the container you want to enter:
PID=$(docker inspect --format {{.State.Pid}} <container_name_or_ID>)
Then enter the container:
nsenter --target $PID --mount --uts --ipc --net --pid
It's just a small shell script that wraps up the steps described above into a tiny helper. It takes the name or ID of a container and optionally the name of a program to execute inside the namespace. If no command is specified a shell will be invoked instead.
# list the root filesystem
docker-enter my_awesome_container ls -la
If you are using boot2docker, you can use the function below, to:
- install
nsenter
anddocker-enter
into boot2docker's /var/lib/boot2docker/ directory, so they survive restarts. - execute
docker-enter
inside of boot2docker combined with ssh
docker-enter() {
boot2docker ssh '[ -f /var/lib/boot2docker/nsenter ] || docker run --rm -v /var/lib/boot2docker/:/target jpetazzo/nsenter'
boot2docker ssh -t sudo /var/lib/boot2docker/docker-enter "$@"
}
You can use it directly from your host (OS X/Windows), no need to ssh into boot2docker.
- This only works on Intel 64 bits platforms. Arguably, this is the
only officially supported platform for Docker; so it's not a big deal.
As soon as the Docker registry supports other architectures, I will
see how to build
nsenter
for those! nsenter
still needs to run from the host; it cannot run inside a container (yet).