zypper-docker

The zypper-docker command line tool provides a quick way to patch and update Docker Images based on either SUSE Linux Enterprise or openSUSE.

zypper-docker mimics zypper command line syntax to ease its usage. This application relies on zypper to perform the actual operations against Docker images.

Targetting Docker daemons running on remote machines

zypper-docker can interact with docker daemons running on remote machines. To do that it uses the same environment variables of the docker client.

docker-machine can be used to configure the remote Docker host and setup the local environment variables.

Commands

Listing images

The images command is similar to the one from Docker, but this one only lists images that are based on either openSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise. Here's an example:

mssola:~ $ docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED              VIRTUAL SIZE
opensuse            latest              c7ff47bc7ebb        13 days ago          254.5 MB
busybox             latest              8c2e06607696        3 months ago         2.43 MB
mssola:~ $ zypper-docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED              VIRTUAL SIZE
opensuse            latest              c7ff47bc7ebb        13 days ago          254.5 MB

Updates

First of all, you can check whether an image has pending updates or not by using the list-updates command. The usage is as follows:

$ zypper docker list-updates (lu) <image>

Similarly, there is the list-updates-container that does the same but targeting an already running container. Note that this command does not touch the running container, but it just detects the image in which the running container is based on, and then it just performs list-updates for the according image. There's a short video about list-updates in action here:

But more important than listing updates is to actually install them. You can do this with the update command. It has the following usage:

$ zypper docker update (up) [options] <image> <new-image>

If there are updates, this command will create a new Docker image based on the given image, but with the needed updates already installed. Therefore, note that zypper-docker will never change anything from the old image. More than that, this command will refuse to overwrite an already existing Docker image.

The available options are:

• --skip-interactive: This will skip interactive patches, that is, those that need reboot, contain a message, or update a package whose license needs to be confirmed.
• --with-interactive: Avoid skipping of interactive patches when in non-interactive mode.
• -l, --auto-agree-with-licenses: Automatically say yes to third party license confirmation prompt. By using this option, you choose to agree with licenses of all third-party software this command will install. This option is particularly useful for administrators installing the same set of packages on multiple machines (by an automated process) and have the licenses confirmed before.
• --no-recommends: By default, zypper installs also packages recommended by the requested ones. This option causes the recommended packages to be ignored and only the required ones to be installed.
• --replacefiles: Install the packages even if they replace files from other, already installed, packages. Default is to treat file conflicts as an error.
• --author: commit author to associate with the new layer. By default it uses the canonical name of the current user.
• --message: commit message to be associated with the new layer. If no message was provided, zypper-docker will write: "[zypper-docker] update".

You can find a small video about the update Command here:

Patches

The operations that can be done for patches is very similar to the ones that can be done for updates. Therefore, the list-patches and the list-patches-container commands are almost identical to the ones for updates. In particular, these are their usage:

$ zypper docker list-patches (lp) [options] image

$ zypper docker list-patches-container (lpc) [options] image

As you will notice, both of these commands accept some options. For these commands the user can filter the results according to the following attributes:

The available options are:

• --bugzilla[=#]: List available needed patches for all Bugzilla issues, or issues whose number matches the given string.
• --cve[=#]: List available needed patches for all CVE issues, or issues whose number matches the given string.
• --date YYYY-MM-DD: List patches issued up to, but not including, the specified date.
• --issues[=string]: Look for issues whose number, summary, or description matches the specified string. Issues found by number are displayed separately from those found by descriptions. In the latter case, use zypper patch-info patchname to get information about issues the patch fixes.
• -g, --category category: List available patches in the specified category.

You can find a small video on listing patches here:

Interestingly enough, zypper can also just check whether there are patches available at all. This is really convenient for using zypper inside of scripts. zypper-docker also implements this in the form of the patch-check command. This is its usage:

$ zypper docker patch-check (pchk) image

This command will exit with a status code of 100 if there are patches available, and 101 if there are not.

Besides listing and checking for patches, you can also of course install them. You do that with the patch command. It has the following usage:

$ zypper docker patch [options] image new-image

Similarly to the update command, this command will not change the original change, but it creates a new patched image. This command also takes into account that the new image does not overwrite an already existing one. The arguments that can be passed to this command are as follows:

• --bugzilla #: Install patch fixing a Bugzilla issue specified by number. Use list-patches --bugzilla command to get a list of available needed patches for specific issues.
• --cve #: Install patch fixing a MITRE’s CVE issue specified by number. Use list-patches --cve command to get a list of available needed patches for specific issues.
• --date YYYY-MM-DD: Install patches issued up to, but not including, the specified date.
• -g, --category category: Install all patches in the specified category. Use list-patches --category command to get a list of available patches for a specific category.
• --skip-interactive: Skip interactive patches.
• --with-interactive: Avoid skipping of interactive patches when in non-interactive mode.
• -l, --auto-agree-with-licenses: See the update command for description of this option.
• --no-recommends: By default, zypper installs also packages recommended by the requested ones. This option causes the recommended packages to be ignored and only the required ones to be installed.
• --replacefiles: Install the packages even if they replace files from other, already installed, packages. Default is to treat file conflicts as an error.
• --author: commit author to associate with the new layer. By default it uses the canonical name of the current user.
• --message: commit message to be associated with the new layer. If no message was provided, zypper-docker will write: "[zypper-docker] patch".

You can find a small video showing off the patch command here:

List all the missing updates

Lastly, zypper-docker also has the ps command. This command traverses through all the running containers and investigates which of them are based on images that have been recently upgraded. Therefore, this command does not provide feedback about all the possible SUSE containers, only the ones that have been updated/patched with the update and patch commands.

This command doesn't have any options, so the usage is quite straight-forward:

$ zypper docker ps

Local cache

Note that some of these commands might be expensive. That's why some of the needed data is cached into a single file. This file is named docker-zypper.json. This cache file normally resides inside of the $HOME/.cache directory. However, if there is some problem with this directory, it might get saved inside of the /tmp directory.

Development environment

It is possible to run all the test suite and the code analysis tool using docker.

Build the docker images

The tests and code analysis tool are going to be executed ran using both the latest stable version of Go and the current experimental version.

To build these docker images type:

$ make build

Run the tests

To run the test suite and the code analysis tools against all Go versions, type:

$ make test

Integration tests

The integration tests invoke the zypper-docker binary and test different scenarios. They are written using RSpec and are located under /spec. The integration tests can be started by doing:

make test_integration

This will build a Docker image containing all the software (RSpec, plus other Ruby gems) required to run the tests. The image will be started, the socket used by the Docker daemon on the host will be mounted inside of the new container. That makes possible to invoke the docker client from within the container itself.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.