mini-container

A minimal container runtime that does very few things

npm install mini-container -g

Notice

This currently relies on chroot and should be migrated to something like cgroups in the future.

Usage

A container is just a folder some where on your system that contains a unpacked linux distro. An easy way to create a container that just has ubuntu 14.04 is to use debootstrap

mkdir container
cd container
sudo debootstrap --variant=buildd --arch amd64 trusty . http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

This will install a local version of ubuntu in ./container. To boot a bash process inside this container just do

# assuming you are in ./container
sudo mini-container /bin/bash # runs /bin/bash sandboxed in this container

Volumes

mini-container allows you to mount host folders inside your container using the --volume /host/path=/container/path flag

# mount /home/maf/test from the host on /root/test in the container
sudo mini-container /bin/bash --volume /home/maf/test=/root/test

Programmatic usage

var mini = require('mini-container')
var child = mini('/bin/bash', {
  cwd: './container',
  volumes: {
    '/home/maf/test': '/root/test'
  }
})
process.stdin.pipe(child.stdin)
child.stdout.pipe(process.stdout)
child.stderr.pipe(process.stderr)

License

MIT