Showcasing your applications with Docker in a single click.
Docker has certainly made a revolution in the application development and deployment ecosystem. You can grab pretty much any application in almost any platform and have a docker image ready to be deployed in the most popular cloud providers in less than a day. Of course, this usually happens if you have some experience with the technology and you know which Docker images are the right ones and how to efficiently build them.
Sometimes, like it happened to me in the past, you just want to try a simple application or experiment with a new technology stack and you end up digging in the Github universe trying to find that beautiful compose file that just puts everything together in the right order so you can simple type docker-compose up -d or docker stack deploy (if you’re running swarm) and magically have a deployed example that you can mess around with and replicate to your own local environment.
Lastly, if you’re someone that is just learning Docker, you will probably end up in DockerHub searching official images and spending a lot of time trying to understand how to parametrize, configure and combine them in order to get a simple example working.
With Jonathan Leibiusky we have developed Play-with-docker and it’s training site to help people get started with it, and today we’d like to announce two new features we’ve been working on which helps to overcome the situations I’ve mentioned above. The first one is an embeddable button that you can use in your dockerhub/github/medium/etc sites to setup a PWD environment and deploy a compose stack right away. Without spoiling any more details, here’s an example to deploy a redis server with redmon with just a single click:
You can include this button in your own site with the following markup:
[](http://play-with-docker.com?stack=/redis/latest)Or in an html format:
<a href="http://play-with-docker.com?stack=/redis/latest"><img src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/play-with-docker/stacks/cff22438/assets/images/button.png" alt="Try in PWD"></a>The second feature which complements the first one, is a Chrome extension (we’ll expand eventually) that adds the “Try in PWD” button to the most popular images in DockerHub. Here’s a short video about how to use it:
If you’re wondering how the extension works, whenever you visit a dockerhub image page, it looks up a default stack from stacks repo and if found, it will show a dialog allowing you to run that stack in PWD. Both the extension and the stacks repo are open source, and we’re always looking for passionate people who would like to contribute by adding new stacks or features.
To finish this post, if you have any suggestions or feedback regarding this features please get in touch so we can continue improving the overall experience for anyone. Additionally, stay tuned to our twitter accounts @marcosnils and @xetorthio as even more amazing stuff is coming.
