"See this docker container? I wish I could run another one just like it,
but I'll be damned if I'm going to type all those command-line switches manually!"

This is what runlike does. You give it a docker container, it outputs the command line necessary to run another one just like it, along with all those pesky options (ports, links, volumes, ...). It's a real time saver for those that normally deploy their docker containers via some CM tool like Ansible/Chef and then find themselves needing to manually re-run some container.

Usage

runlike <container-name>

This prints out what you need to run to get a similar container. You can do $(runlike container-name) to simply execute its output in one step.

-p breaks the command line down to nice, pretty lines. For example:

$ runlike -p redis

docker run \
    --name=redis \
    -e "PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin" \
    -e "REDIS_VERSION=2.8.9" \
    -e "REDIS_DOWNLOAD_URL=http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-2.8.9.tar.gz" \
    -e "REDIS_DOWNLOAD_SHA1=003ccdc175816e0a751919cf508f1318e54aac1e" \
    -p 0.0.0.0:6379:6379/tcp \
    --detach=true \
    myrepo/redis:7860c450dbee9878d5215595b390b9be8fa94c89 \
    redis-server --slaveof 172.31.17.84 6379

Feeding it the output of docker inspect also works:

docker inspect <container-name> | runlike --stdin

--no-name will omit the container name from the output (to avoid collisions).

Run without installing

runlike is packaged as a Docker image: assaflavie/runlike.

docker run --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    assaflavie/runlike YOUR-CONTAINER

You can also run it with an alias by adding the following to your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc:

alias runlike="docker run --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock assaflavie/runlike"

Now runlike should be available as a local command:

runlike YOUR-CONTAINER

Install

$ pip install runlike

Status

This is very much a work in progress. Many docker run options aren't yet supported, but the most commonly used ones are. Feel free to send pull requests if you add any or if you happen to fix any (of the many) bugs this package undoubtedly has.

Probably shouldn't use this in production yet. If you do, double check that it's actually running what you want it to run.

Support status is generated from round-trip probe results and the checked-in option dictionary:

• Markdown matrix: generated/support-matrix.md
• Machine-readable matrix: generated/support-matrix.json