Deploy with Docker Compose¶

Docker is a virtualization software packaging applications and its dependencies in a virtual container that can run on any Linux server. It is available for a variety of the operating systems, e.g. Linux, macOS and Windows. For more information follow the link here.

NEST Desktop and NEST Simulator are prepared in different containers, but you can use docker-compose to start multiple containers, e.g. NEST Desktop, NEST Simulator. Docker Compose needs the configuration file (docker-compose.yml).

Here, the guide shows you how to build containers with docker-compose.

Requirements:

Docker Compose

Preparation¶

Prepare your local environment by installing Docker (if you have not installed it yet).

apt install docker-compose

Get the configuration file¶

The configuration file docker-compose.yml contains all setup steps executed by Docker. Fetch this file from GitHub:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nest-desktop/nest-desktop/main/docker/docker-compose.yml

It will pull images of NEST Desktop and NEST Simulator can be started from within the official NEST image (https://hub.docker.org/nest/nest-simulator).

Getting started¶

Build and start the NEST Desktop and NEST Simulator containers.

docker-compose up --build

NEST Desktop and NEST Simulator are now serving at http://localhost:54286 and http://localhost:52425, respectively. With Ctrl+C you can shutdown these services.

Configurations in docker-compose.yml

Here, you can find the details of the configuration file.

image	Get docker image from Docker Hub
container_name	Set container name
ports	Bind host ports to container ports
command	Execute command on container start
environment	Set environment variables

Alternatively, you can clone the source code so that you can change the Dockerfile and build custom docker images on your machine. For more information, visit the page https://github.com/nest-desktop/nest-desktop-docker.

Upgrade images¶

First stop the containers and shut down all services “nest-desktop” and “nest-simulator”.

docker-compose stop
docker-compose down

Then pull images from docker hub.

docker-compose pull

Afterwards, you can start the services and containers.

docker-compose up --no-start
docker-compose start

Useful commands¶

In the following you can find some useful commands for docker-compose.

List containers.

docker-compose ps

If there are no services (nest-desktop and nest-simulator) in the displayed list, it means that no containers can be started. You can attach a container for services without starting it using --no-start.

docker-compose up --no-start

Then start all services nest-desktop and nest-simulator as daemon.

docker-compose start

Stop all services, here nest-desktop and nest-simulator.

docker-compose stop

Shutdown all services, here nest-desktop and nest-simulator.

docker-compose down

Set environments¶

Custom port of NEST Simulator

For some reason the port 52425 is already occupied and thus starting the server instance of NEST Simulator might cause conflicts. To resolve this issue, you can change the port to 54321 for NEST Simulator server instance.

You have to change three lines:

Set the environment NEST_SIMULATOR_PORT: 54321 in nest-desktop service.
Set the environment NEST_SERVER_PORT: 54321 in nest-simulator service.
Change the port binding to "54321:54321" in nest-simulator service.

An example configuration for docker-compose would be:

version: "3"

services:
  nest-desktop:
    image: nest/nest-desktop:4.0
    environment:
      NEST_SIMULATOR_PORT: 54321
    ports:
      - "54286:54286"

  nest-simulator:
    image: nest/nest-simulator:3.8
    environment:
      NEST_CONTAINER_MODE: "nest-server"
      NEST_SERVER_PORT: 54321
    ports:
      - "54321:54321"

Acknowledgments¶

Thanks for the help:

Steffen Graber (Docker Hub for NEST Simulator)
Jochen Martin Eppler (API Server for NEST Simulator)