Installation

Prerequisites

It’s recommended you add your user to the docker group:

$ sudo usermod -a -G docker USERNAME

and logout and in again to pick up the changes.

Alternatively you can run floki (after installation) with sudo -E floki.

Installation from pre-built binaries

Precompiled binaries for linux and OSX can be downloaded from the releases page.

For example, to obtain the latest binary with curl and extract it, run

$ curl -L https://github.com/Metaswitch/floki/releases/download/0.6.2/floki-0.6.2-linux.tar.gz | tar xzvf -

in a shell. You should now be able to run floki from your working directory:

$ ./floki --version
floki 0.6.1

Copy this into your path to run it without needing to specify the path absolutely. E.g.

$ mv floki /usr/local/bin/

Installation from cargo

floki can also be installed directly from cargo.

$ cargo install floki

Shell completions

Shell completions can be added to your existing shell session with

source <(floki completion <shell>)

See floki completion --help for a list of available <shell>s. Add this command to your shell’s rc file to get completions in all new shell sessions.

Enjoy!

Getting started

floki is configured using a configuration file typically placed in the root of your codebase. As a basic example, write a basic configuration file, and name it floki.yaml.

image: debian:latest
init:
  - echo "Welcome to your first floki container!"

Now, in the same directory, run

floki

A container will launch with the working directory mounted as your working directory. Verify this by running ls:

$ ls
...  floki.yaml  ...

In general, invoking floki in any child directory of this root directory will launch a container with: - The directory containing floki.yaml mounted; - The container shell located in the guest directory corresponding to the child.

Using a different configuration file

You can use a different configuration file with floki by telling it to use a different file from the command line. For example, if you have another configuration in config.yaml, you can run floki with

floki -c config.yaml

Note that, in contrast to invoking floki without the -c flag, this will always mount the current working directory.

Features you may want to look at next

• Forwarding of ssh-agent (useful for authenticating with remote private git servers to pull private dependencies)
• Docker-in-docker support
• Forwarding of host user information (allows non-root users to be added and used).
• floki volumes for setting up cross-session build caches.