In this post, we show how to operate docker using Digitalocean’s cloud provider. With the introduction of docker-machine in the recent versions of Docker, spinning a new droplet with docker is a few bash command lines away.

Requirements

You need to have a digitalocean’s account along with an access token to create droplets. For more details, see Digitalocean website.

From now on, we assume that you have set your digitalocean access token that allows you to create a new droplet and it is set to an environment variable, i.e.,

export DIGOCEAN_TOKEN=XXXXXXXXXXX

Start up Rancher

Rancher is a containers administration and monitoring tool. In the next few steps, we create a droplet that runs Rancher which will allow us to operate our containers.

# Creates a Rancher droplet
#!/bin/bash

export DROPLET_NAME=rancher
export DIGITALOCEAN_REGION=fra1 # Frankfurt, you may want to change this
export DIGITALOCEAN_SIZE=2gb
export DIGITALOCEAN_PRIVATE_NETWORKING=true

docker-machine create --driver digitalocean \
                      --digitalocean-access-token ${DIGOCEAN_TOKEN} \
                      ${DROPLET_NAME}

Run the above script to create a Rancher droplet. Then, ssh to this droplet using

docker-machine ssh rancher

And then run docker run -d --restart=always -p 8080:8080 rancher/server to start the Rancher server. Do a docker ps to check the logs

docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                              NAMES
3f6fd41d0b86        rancher/server      "/usr/bin/s6-svscan /"   7 minutes ago       Up 7 minutes        3306/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp   compassionate_ritchie

Logout from the droplet and do to see the IP of your Rancher server.

docker-machine ip rancher
46.101.105.42

Browse to http://46.101.105.42:8080/

Add a docker host to Rancher

To add a node on rancher, you just need to run rancher agent on any node, say rancher node. Go to Rancher web interface and follow the instruction to add a host.