I am curious by nature and an idealist since day of birth. (i guess that makes me, being both by nature?? Anyway!)
So i am brainstormed daily by ideas and curiosity drives my interest, to learn more and dig around to see if my idea could be possible at all.
I had an idea some months ago, where applications/programs installed on a Windows machine, would not interfere with each other.
After some digging around, behold, i found about docker.
I read articles and watched videos around the idea of docker, and i was amazed. It was exactly what i was after.
No VMs or multi-boot partitioned SSD and yet each application does not cause any issues to the rest installed apps.
So i started reading and watching videos on setting up docker etc.
Then i was disappointed.
Though this is a really nice and cool idea, I have no idea how to code etc.
I consider my self a tad above than an average user. I know what are registry keys, powershell, cmd etc, but that does not make me anything else other than a user still.
Simply put, i am no programmer, coder or what so ever.
So i was thinking, if there is a way to do things like docker, but less coding required??
Something like a Virtual Machine setup but more like docker, but less than coding docker, somewhere in between??
Does this make any sense???
Thanks in advance to anyone that read the whole post, and to anyone that might care to reply with any ideas.
The only “coding” involved with Docker is the required automation during build time (what your Dockerfile does) and in the entrypoint scripts during container start.
if you want things to be automated, the cost of creation the automation remains. You still need to know how each and every item needs to be installed and configured by scripts. You can’t have just the magic of automation, without defining what the magic actualy does.
Without automation you end up with the typical windows ui driven “next->next->finish” approach, wich is a non fit for Docker or everything else that relies on automatiion. Though, you might become happy with creating individual vms.
That’s interesting.
I thought way to much coding was involved. Maybe the videos and guides i watched was too “techie” for me.
Thanks, you gave me courage to revisit the idea and have a second look on this.
One question though, do i have to be the developer of that app to get the whole thing done?
Or can i just use the installer or similar to get the app to run?
This is a part i did not understand at all.
If you are able to install your application from batch/powershell silently, then you already know most of what is required to put your application in the image
Most people that create images are not developers or in any way affiliated to the product they build the image for. Usualy people build images because there is no official image available or the available image is insufficient for their needs.
I did build dozens of images for products/services. The only required knowledge is which dependencies need to be installed before the main service can be installed AND where does it store its configuration, in case you want to create an entrypoint scripts that renderes values passed in as envionment variable into the configuration files.
Even though I am a developer (one of many skill) , only scripting the RUN declarations in the Dockerfile and creating entrypoint scripts needs to be done. Coding, as in changing the application, is not required.
