
Kitematic – The easiest way to start using Docker on your Mac - alpacaaa
http://kitematic.com/
======
mchiang
One of the creators of Kitematic here. Our github repo is here:
[https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic](https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic)

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chanux
Nicely done. Nice name too.

One could use such a nice UI on linux too ;)

PS: I don't want a nice UI. There sure are others who would.

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notduncansmith
Great work, guys! I just wanted to let everyone know that there's a HipChat
support room[1] for this project, the creators are there and super helpful.
Jeffrey and Michael definitely just set a new bar for open-source project
support.

[1] [https://www.hipchat.com/giAT9Fqb5](https://www.hipchat.com/giAT9Fqb5)

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thejosh
What's wrong with IRC? :)

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notduncansmith
Nothing really, though I've personally never had a great experience with IRC
(not the medium's fault of course). I was remarking more on the enthusiasm and
helpfulness of the team.

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hibbelig
I wish it wasn't necessary to use a VM to run Docker on a Mac. Shouldn't it be
easy to get Jails running on OSX, and wouldn't that be a good basis for
Docker? (I'm not sure.)

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jpgvm
You still have the issue of not having an implementation of an Ethernet or
network virtualisation features like Crossbow/VImage.

Even if you were to solve that you would be stuck with the VFS graph driver
unless you could get a CoW filesystem up and running on OSX (maybe revamp the
old ZFS port?).

Docker is much more than just jailing is basically the problem.

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toomuchcpu
My MacBookPro's fans start running right after I launch this.

Activity Monitor shows that the node-helper process is eating up no less than
20% cpu, even when no apps are active.

(are all Meteor apps like this?)

This looks nice but unless you can fix that I'm just going to stick with using
Docker on OSX the hard way.

~~~
zek
I find that I have a similar issue with all node apps on my Macbook Pro

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benologist
This is great and I've been wanting to try out Docker for a while. Here's some
feedback:

1) I had to delete my existing host-only networks

2) Images could be pre-populated with popular images so you're only a click
away from getting started with an app. As a first-time docker user I don't
have any of that stuff lying around.

Edited to add:

3) A progress indicator would be great creating/starting apps and images

4) am I supposed to install docker separately to access the command line
tools?

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mchiang
In case you're having installer issues: [https://kitematic.com/docs/known-
issue-fixes/](https://kitematic.com/docs/known-issue-fixes/)

If that doesn't fix, please submit a bug report:
[https://kitematic.com/docs/help-us-debug/](https://kitematic.com/docs/help-
us-debug/)

Feel free to jump in our support chat as well.

Sorry for the trouble. We're working on a fix.

~~~
mchiang
No installation step should take over 1 minute. If it's more than that, there
is probably an error.

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fishnchips
Great idea, unfortunately in my case the setup phase gets stuck on 'Setting up
the default Kinematic images...'.

~~~
mchiang
Hey,

Kitematic seems to have a conflict with older versions of boot2docker at the
moment. We're still looking into this issue.

In the meantime, some of our users have found success in doing this:

1\. In the terminal run boot2docker delete 2\. Open Virtualbox and delete the
boot2docker vm 3\. Delete all the host-only networks under
VirtualBox=>Preferences=>Network=>Host-only networks tab 4\. Run the installer
again

Sorry about all the trouble. We're looking into fixes.

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nXqd
As a devops user, this would be not so useful. It was my first thought when I
saw this. But, wait a minute, if this can replace MAMP, or XAMPP, it would be
great. It will help the new user get the development environment setting up in
no time, isolated environment and beautiful application. It would be a win.

Nice work !

~~~
lfx
For the same reason I use Vagrant. I would like to hear why would anybody use
Docker instead of Vagrant and vice versa?

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mikeflynn
One difference is that Vagrant is a full stand-alone server VM rather than a
shared container like Docker, so Vagrant is better for housing multiple
services in a single Vagrant instance, while Docker is better off housing a
single-use application/service.

Example: If you wanted to run a complex local dev environment with apache,
mysql, memcache, varnish, etc... You could run that all in a single large VM
(provisioned and booted by Vagrant) or by multiple Docker containers (one for
each service).

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dominotw
Isn't this(
[http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/](http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/))
the easiest way to use docker on a mac? Its just 3 shell commands and an
installer.

I am not clear what kitematic is exactly. A UI on top of docker?

~~~
mchiang
Pretty much just a GUI in our beta. We do some things special like:

\- Automatically creates a folder under ~/Kitematic for each Volume.

\- One click NSEnter into any container.

\- Any container can be accessed at <container_name>.dev (automatically sets
up a DNS for you, so you can connect a database too using that URL).

We're really just trying to make Docker easier to use for Mac right now. More
will come.

~~~
Smudge
Does your `.dev` container access conflict with users of pow.cx? Is that
configurable?

~~~
mchiang
Not sure yet. Still doing tests around it. [The goal of this beta release is
to find most of the bugs so we can iron it out]. I'm sure we'll iron out most
of them in the coming week.

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StavrosK
Aw what! Why is this OS X only? :-(

EDIT: Never mind, forgot I had a mac.

~~~
notduncansmith
It solves a very specific problem - using Docker on OS X is a giant pain. It's
pretty easy on something like Ubuntu, but for Mac the typical solution
involves Vagrant + a VM, so startup times are slow, it eats a lot of memory
and CPU, etc.

~~~
mrinterweb
I disagree that "using Docker on OS X is a giant pain". I don't really see how
this is more than a GUI that works with boot2docker and docker. Kitematic
appears to be using boot2docker under the hood. I think using boot2docker is
very simple. Once boot2docker is running, as far as I can tell, using docker
is the same experience people have on linux.

~~~
shabble
mounting host directories into containers with -v is one place b2d definitely
hurts more than running on linux directly.

The options appear to be:

1\. Don't do that

2\. Mount something via samba into the b2d vm, then -v it into your container

3\. Use virtualbox directory sharing (which won't work properly/at all)

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digitalsanctum
Is there a roadmap of what's to come? How about linking containers?

~~~
mchiang
Linking containers is definitely something we're looking into for the future.

In this release, there is environment variable support in settings.

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pearknob
Great job. I love tools that make things dead simple :)

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rodrigoavie
Thanks!

