Whalebrew

Whalebrew creates aliases for Docker images so you can run them as if they were native commands. It's like Homebrew, but with Docker images.

Docker works well for packaging up development environments, but there are lots of tools that aren't tied to a particular project: awscli for managing your AWS account, ffmpeg for converting video, wget for downloading files, and so on. Whalebrew makes those things work with Docker, too.

$ whalebrew install whalebrew/whalesay
Unable to find image 'whalebrew/whalesay' locally
Using default tag: latest
latest: Pulling from whalebrew/whalesay
c60055a51d74: Pull complete
755da0cdb7d2: Pull complete
969d017f67e6: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:5f3a2782b400b2b23774709e0685d65b4493c6cbdb62fff6bbbd2a6bd393845b
Status: Downloaded newer image for whalebrew/whalesay:latest
🐳  Installed whalebrew/whalesay to /usr/local/bin/whalesay
$ whalesay cool
 ______
< cool >
 ------
   \
    \
     \
                   ##        .
             ## ## ##       ==
          ## ## ## ##      ===
      /""""""""""""""""___/ ===
 ~~~ {~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~ ~ /  ===- ~~~
      \______ o          __/
       \    \        __/
         \____\______/

Whalebrew can run almost any CLI tool, but it isn't for everything (e.g. where commands must start instantly). It works particularly well for:

• Complex dependencies. For example, a Python app that requires C libraries, specific package versions, and other CLI tools that you don't want to clutter up your machine with.
• Cross-platform portability. Package managers tend to be very closely tied to the system they are running on. Whalebrew packages work on any modern version of macOS, Linux, and Windows (coming soon).

Install

First, install Docker. The easiest way to do this on macOS is by installing Docker for Mac.

Next, on macOS and Linux:

curl -L "https://github.com/bfirsh/whalebrew/releases/download/0.0.3/whalebrew-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/whalebrew; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/whalebrew

Windows support is theoretically possible, but not implemented yet.

Usage

### Install packages

$ whalebrew install whalebrew/wget

This will install the image whalebrew/wget as /usr/local/bin/wget.

The images in the whalebrew organization are a set of images that are known to work well with Whalebrew. You can also install any other images on Docker Hub too, but they may not work well:

$ whalebrew install bfirsh/ffmpeg

Find packages

$ whalebrew search
whalebrew/ack
whalebrew/awscli
whalebrew/docker-cloud
whalebrew/ffmpeg
whalebrew/gnupg
...

$ whalebrew search wget
whalebrew/wget

List installed packages

$ whalebrew list
COMMAND     IMAGE
ffmpeg      bfirsh/ffmpeg
wget        whalebrew/wget
whalebrew   whalebrew/whalebrew
whalesay    whalebrew/whalesay

### Uninstall packages

$ whalebrew uninstall wget

### Upgrade packages

To upgrade a single package, just pull its image:

$ docker pull whalebrew/wget

Configuration

Whalebrew is configured with environment variables, which you can either provide at runtime or put in your ~/.bashrc file (or whatever shell you use).

• WHALEBREW_INSTALL_PATH: The directory to install packages in. (default: /usr/local/bin)

How it works

Whalebrew is simple, and leans as much as possible on native Docker features:

• Packages are installed as files in /usr/local/bin (or a directory that you configure) with a shebang to make them executable. The content of the file is YAML that describes the options to pass to docker run, similar to a Compose service. For example:

    #!/usr/bin/env whalebrew
    image: whalebrew/whalesay
  

• When a package is executed, Whalebrew will run the specified image with Docker, mount the current working directory in /workdir, and pass through all of the arguments.

  To understand what it is doing, you can imagine it as a shell script that looks something like this:

  docker run -it -v "$(pwd)":/workdir -w /workdir $IMAGE "$@"
  

Creating packages

Packages are Docker images published on Docker Hub. The requirements to make them work are:

• They must have the command to be run set as the entrypoint.
• They must only work with files in /workdir.

That's it. So long as your image is set up to work that way, it'll work with Whalebrew.

Configuration

There are some labels you can use to configure how Whalebrew installs your image:

• io.whalebrew.name: The name to give the command. Defaults to the name of the image.

• io.whalebrew.config.environment: A list of environment variables to pass into the image from the current environment when the command is run. For example, putting this in your Dockerfile will pass through the values of TERM and FOOBAR_NAME in your shell when the command is run:

    LABEL io.whalebrew.config.environment '["TERM", "FOOBAR_NAME"]'
  

• io.whalebrew.config.volumes: A list of volumes to mount when the command is run. For example, putting this in your image's Dockerfile will mount ~/.docker as /root/.docker in read-only mode:

    LABEL io.whalebrew.config.volumes '["~/.docker:/root/.docker:ro"]'
  

• io.whalebrew.config.ports: A list of host port to container port mappings to create when the command is run. For example, putting this in your image's Dockerfile will map container port 8100 to host port 8100:

    LABEL io.whalebrew.config.ports '["8100:8100"]'
  

Whalebrew images

We maintain a set of packages which are known to follow these requirements under the whalebrew organization on GitHub and Docker Hub. If you want to add a package to this, open a pull request against whalebrew-packages.

Thanks

• Justin Cormack for the original idea and generally just being very clever.