We love Digital Ocean for many reasons, that list of reasons includes a big one - Digital Ocean is powering our Production Infrastructure.

For a long time, Digital Ocean has been a great way to get affordable, powerful and simplified Cloud computing up and running. For as little as $5 per month you can get a nice little droplet ( VM ) up and running in seconds, to host your ColdFusion app, wordpress site ( excuse my language ) or even Docker instances or a full Docker Swarm. Digital Ocean keeps improving its offering, and this year, we committed to moving our production infrastructure over to Digital Ocean, and now I'm happy to say we've been running on Digital Ocean for months now, and things have never been better. We get a lot of questions about how our setup looks, so this post will give you a little more insight into our Production Infrastructure, powered by Digital Ocean.

Ortus Solutions prides itself on always learning, and evolving. Whether we learn from our colleagues, clients, community members, or other languages and communities, this all helps Ortus keep pushing forward and innovating. The CFML Community has been asking for Docker information lately, we knew Docker would be very important moving forward, and that is why we made it a priority for Ortus Solutions over the last 2 years. This week Luis and Gavin will be attending Docker Con 2018 in San Francisco ( June 12 - 15, 2018 ) to help further our learning, through great content, and great networking. If you are attending, we'd love to talk to you.

At Ortus Solutions, we love the holidays, and we wanted to gift you a gift of developer productivity, we will share a few tips and tricks that will keep giving all year around. In this series we'll be giving you 12 ContentBox tips. Keep your eye out for other 12 tips of Christmas series on our blog, including a new one this year, 12 modules of Christmas on ForgeBox.

Day 11 - ContentBox and Docker - A lot of people are asking Ortus for help with their Docker setups, so many requests we did a whole roadshow on Containers / Docker. We have several Webinars, and blog posts, and a good number of those posts mentioned to featured ContentBox.

Here are our slides from our ColdBox Hierarchical MVC presentation at this year's Adobe ColdFusion Summit. You can also find the source code for our demo here: https://github.com/lmajano/hmvc-presso-demo or you can install it via CommandBox: box install lmajano/hmvc-presso-demo.

Today we released our 3.8 series of docker images ( current source version 2.1.0 ) which include a number of improvements and enhancements.

Change Log

• Updates to CommandBox v3.8+
• Adds support for Docker secrets
• Adds casing aliases for environment variables
• Adds new opinionated password security
• Updates to runtime output for clarity
• Changes image for alpine build to prevent CommandBox errors when installing dependencies

We've made a new screencast that shows an introduction to FusionReactor Cloud, a new way to monitor any number of servers in a consolidated interface that can scale up and down with your infrastructure.  Not only do new servers automatically register and deregister themselves with the Cloud dashboard, but it supports a pay-for-what-you-use model that prevents you from locking into a specific number of licenses.  

Whether you are new to Docker, a Docker expert, or even sticking with a traditional server setup, using environment variables will make your code more dynamic, more portable, and more ready for your eventual transition to Docker (or whatever comes next). Come learn how to use them in CFML, Docker, and the various tools around these technologies.

The Docker CLI has an extensive suite of commands built-in and it can be painful to remember all of them. So as part of our containers roadshow, we will be blogging about useful tips and tricks for working with containers. We all make mistakes and we all need to be able remove containers from time to time. So let's go ahead and start!

Remove one or more specific containers

Use the docker ps command with the -a flag to locate the name/ID of the containers you want to remove:

# list
docker ps -a

# remove
docker rm ID/nameID/name

Remove Container Upon Exit

If you want to cleanup after yourself, then you can automatically delete a container once it exists from runnable operation using the docker run --rm command.

docker run --rm image_name

Remove All Exited Containers

You can locate containers using docker ps -a and filter them by their status: created, restarting, running, paused, or exited. To review the list of exited containers, use the -f flag to filter based on status. When you've verified you want to remove those containers, using -q to pass the IDs to the docker rm command.

docker ps -a -f status=exited
docker rm $(docker ps -a -f status=exited -q)

Remove Containers Using More Than 1 Filter

Docker filters can be combined by repeating the filter flag with an additional value.

docker ps -a -f status=exited -f status=created
docker rm $(docker ps -a -f status=exited -f status=created -q)

Remove Containers According to Patterns

You can find all the containers that match a pattern using a combination of docker ps and grep. When you're satisfied that you have the list you want to delete, you can use awk and xargs to supply the ID to docker rmi. Please note this will only work on unix based systems.

docker ps -a |  grep "pattern”
docker ps -a | grep "pattern" | awk '{print $3}' | xargs docker rmi

Stop and remove all containers

You can review the containers on your system with docker ps. Adding the -a flag will show all containers. Then you can get funky and pass them to the stop or rm commands.

docker ps -a
docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

We all need some help from time to time. The Docker CLI has an extensive suite of commands built-in and it can be painful to remember all of them. So as part of our containers roadshow, we will be blogging about useful tips and tricks for working with containers. We all make mistakes and we all need to be able remove images from time to time. So let's go ahead and start!

Remove one or more specific images

By using the docker images command with the -a flag, you can list all the images in the system by leveraging the image ID. Here is some example output:

$ docker images -a
REPOSITORY                         TAG                    IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
<none>                             <none>                 178eecd0d35a        3 days ago          64MB
nginx_nginx                        latest                 56dab2b8fae4        3 days ago          64MB
<none>                             <none>                 e80436974f2f        3 days ago          64MB
<none>                             <none>                 bea15fa1eee1        3 days ago          64MB

Once you have located the image you want to wipe away pass the ID to the docker rmi command:

docker rmi ImageID

Removing Dangling Images

Please remember that docker images consist of multiple software layers. Dangling images are layers that have no relationships to any images or containers. Basically, orphaned images which still can cosume plenty of space. They can be located by adding the -f with a value of dangling=true to the docker images command. You can pass the -q flag to get a listing of image ID's and pass that to the rmi command for a nice concatenated removal:

# List
docker images -f dangling=true

# Remove them all baby
docker rmi $(docker images -f dangling=true -q)

Removing Images According to Patterns

You can get fancy by leveraging the grep command (in unix only) and the docker images command to get a nice listing according to patterns. Once you are golden with the images you want, you can then further pipe the command to awk to clean up the buffer and finally pass them to the rmi command.

# listing
docker ps -a |  grep "pattern"

#removing 
docker images | grep "pattern" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm

Removing All Images

Ok, we want to start fresh and cleany and minty fresh. Just use the following to remove all images

docker rmi $(docker images -a -q)

Don't drink and rmi.

The Ortus Solution roadshow continues, we'll keep bringing you free webinars and blog posts through the month of September. If you have tuned in already, you might have learned what Docker is, why you could / should use it, and then maybe a little of how to use it. If the first part of this mini series on First Docker Compose we saw how ou can spin up a Docker container pretty easily, with a command or two, but usually, we work with multiple servers. Docker-Compose makes that easier, it doesn't have to be too confusing. We are building on top of part 1, where we spun up a CFML Server container by itself, and then we added a simple MySQL Server. Next we're going to add Nginx in front of the CFML Server container, and then we'll do more with the MySQL server, like add a database, and then seed it ( preload it ) with data to get things rolling. That is what we're going to look at today.