QuickBox as a Docker App

JMSolo · May 4, 2016, 5:51pm

It has been asked several times within the Swizards/QuickBox repo if it would be possible to produce a QuickBox Docker App. Well, it looks like the day is upon us to where this little tidbit of awesomeness may be just a week or two away (maybe sooner, but I personally am in turtle mode).

What will this accomplish?

Well, this will address a number of issues that have been found across the board. Above all the quandaries one may face when installing is this … No need to address, reinstall, adjust mount points in plugins etc etc. to have QuickBox work properly with listing diskspace and handling user quotas.

QuickBox at the moment does require a bit of finesse. Not so much as other applications, but the script does require that you (the user) have it installed on a server wherein / is your primary partition… handling all the space. This is especially bothersome as some providers do not allow the user to create custom partitions, and some people do not want to submit a reinstall. Thus, Docker… and… done.

Install will be much more… “breezy”

With less to worry about in regards to commands etc. You’ll really only need to focus on creating your initial username and password.
Are you using a provider that has a dozen active ports and QuickBox gives interesting at best results as to your traffic? Great, Docker. This will be solved as your QuickBox will be preserved within a container using standard eth0 network ports, these are then communicating outside the container to your physical network ports on your server. The QuickBox container will easily handle all the finer details and allow you to just… enjoy.
OMG Updates! That’s right. At present updates are a “At your own risk” sort of offering. This is great other than it can be a pain and sometimes you just don’t want to fumble with curl this and curl that form a repo to handle these updates and assume they are going to the right place… you get it right… updates aren’t very user friendly. Using Docker however, QuickBox can receive it’s updates as follows
simply logging into your ssh
cd /srv/quickbox
./launcher rebuild quickbox
Done!

So there it is. Be on the lookout for the update/announcement. As usual any and all ideas are very appreciated and they are never too big or too small. Feel free to let us know what you think in some replies.

ALSO

All issues will be handled here within the quickbox.io community from here on out. If you are posting issues to the GitHub repo, start pushing them this way.

JMSolo · May 10, 2016, 10:09pm

Docker application is taking a back seat for a moment as we finalize some additional assets within the QuickBox script itself. There is one main concern that will be needing to be addressed in regards to the docker application of QuickBox. How partitions work inside of docker itself.

It appears as though the fstab is void of any info, and this wouldn’t be a sound solution as docker containers are not physical drives. This presents us with potentially having to figure out how to set a storage volume that the container can read/write quotas to. It is plausible that the docker container would read off the host file it’s contained in… in test cases it was /var/quickbox. Again, this presents the issue with how docker would handle a quota system.

Docker integration on a single use case scenario however, would not be hard to achieve. It’s the multi-user integration that becomes the problem. If there are any experienced “Dockers” out there… please chime in with your response as to how you would handle this potential solution.

In the meantime, while fiddling with new features and requests, I will set aside time throughout the week to continue to working on a proper workaround. This does imply that there is no current eta for a Docker/QuickBox marriage – at least – not for multi-user scenarios.