Release official Docker image of nomad

[eugene-chernyshenko]

Please consider releasing a blessed Docker image of nomad on Dockerhub, similar to Vault and Consul

[preetapan]

@eugene-chernyshenko We've previously discussed this in issue #2116

While we could release a docker image that constraints the use of Nomad agents only as servers, its important to note that Nomad clients need access to the underlying host to fingerprint CPU/Disk/Memory etc. We can provide workarounds in the dockerfile, but this is not a recommended way to run Nomad clients in production.

We'll keep this issue open to gauge interest/demand.

[eugene-chernyshenko]

We understand it. We want to use docker image for nomad server only. It would be helpful for many people. You can describe this moment in the documentation

[FernandoMiguel]

I'm also interested in the servers only

[tommyalatalo]

I am interested in having an official nomad image for CI/CD purposes to that it would be possible to run nomad jobs from a pipeline without having to install it into the environment.

Would be much nicer having an official image than relying on community members to keep updating to the latest version.

[berkant]

I'm also looking for a dockerized server image as well. Clients are already running in a bare metal AMI.

[xeroc]

I would like to have a nomad image so that I can run the nomad-cli in ci/cd. Non need for server or client in my use-case.

[kds-rune]

I would like to have a nomad image so that I can run the nomad-cli in ci/cd. Non need for server or client in my use-case.

I've built container images on docker-hub for this use-case. Would be nice to have an official image. It seems many people have done this as well, but most images I found are not maintained.

If the repository "https://github.com/hashicorp/docker-nomad" was created, I'd think a pull request from someone would be made rather quickly & this old issue closed.

[josegonzalez]

Hi from SeatGeek!

We would like an official docker image as well. We use Nomad Enterprise to test things in CI - notably, our homegrown deployment tooling - and it would be nice to be able to run a nomad cluster in tests. Currently we build our own image, but that is annoying because we now need to maintain another thing. We understand the limits of running

This isn't the case for Consul and Vault, where we can pull the image from docker hub and use it in testing at will. It seems like a huge oversight from our end. I've also raised this concern with our customer success manager in the past, but I'm happy to chat more at length with whomever from Hashicorp to get the ball rolling on this.

As mentioned by @kds-rune, folks would definitely pile on to create a PR for this if the repository was created. Me, I'm folks :)

[zhenik]

I think that one of the problem is that nomad has docker driver which requires an access to the docker host (docker container is accessing its docker host does not sound right).

ps. Other way to go is using other virtualization software such as vagrant.

[josegonzalez]

I don't think thats a problem. If folks need a particular driver, they'll of course need to setup the dependencies for that driver. Would we also block creating an image because the official image might not include Java for the Java Driver?

[tgross]

For clarity, the primary reason we don't ship a container isn't because of the task drivers. It's because correctly configuring Nomad clients to run as Docker containers is fairly hard. https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/docs/install/production/requirements#linux-capabilities goes into a lot of detail as to why we require that Nomad clients run as unconstrained root. It's technically possible to run a Nomad client in a container but doing so correctly is non-trivial and requires a solid understanding of some of the low-level details. This would represent a huge support burden for us. Publishing a Docker image would only encourage folks to deploy in a way we don't intend to support (at least for now).

(That being said, running servers in a container is totally fine, which is why we're even considering this at all and haven't just closed the issue 😀 )

[runeron]

I can imagine many people, like myself, might like an official image only for running the servers (e.g. in kubernetes/compose).

I have been running k8s + nomad this way in my testlab since Kelsey H held this presentation at HashiConf 2017.

Currently I build my own nomad container images for this purpose + for use in automation/pipelines.

[marcaurele]

Now that nomad include the fmt command¹, it makes sense to have a container image of nomad in order to validate the job specs at a CI stage. It would also allow to use the CI to perform job deployment automatically.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/pull/14779 ↩