Kastenwesen ╰［°‿°］╯

A python script for managing multiple docker containers on a server. Roughly equivalent to a simplified version of docker-compose, plus status monitoring and automatic rebuilds on security updates.

Imagine your server has multiple services that you want to separate and manage using docker.

• Set up a configuration that says how your docker containers should be linked, which ports should be exposed and which volumes should be used.
• Look at the status of your containers and services with kastenwesen status. It also tells you if a container is running, but the service inside is not responding to TCP/HTTP requests.
• If you change something, just run kastenwesen rebuild, lean back and wait until all containers have been rebuilt and then restarted.
• You still understand what this script is doing, because all executed docker commands are shown in the output. You could always run these yourself if something goes wrong.
• If there is a security update for a package that some of your containers depend on, simply run kastenwesen rebuild --no-cache, so that docker's cache is not used and the fresh package is downloaded.

Even more is possible: You can use kastenwesen inside a VM, or even in a CI pipeline, to test your server config before it goes live.

Testing it inside a vagrant VM

If you don't want to run the commands on your PC, you can set up a VM. (Docker inside docker will usually not work if you have AppArmor etc. configured securely) A bootstrapping script tested for Ubuntu 22 or Debian 12 is available at install_dependencies_ubuntu.sh . If you are using other distributions, please give feedback whether it works for you.

Setting up a VM with vagrant:

You can also use vagrant + VirtualBox:

vagrant up
./kastenwesen_vagrant_wrapper.py [arguments]

More directly, you can also SSH into the target VM and execute kastenwesen commands there

vagrant ssh # connect into the machine
cd share # this is the same as this git folder

sudo -i
cd /home/vagrant/share/example-config
kastenwesen status
kastenwesen rebuild
curl localhost

Continuous integration

If you want to check your server config in CI before deploying, you can find some notes in this section.

You at least want to run kastenwesen rebuild in your CI build, wait some time (depending on the configured startup gracetime) and then check kastenwesen status.

As a starting point for using GitHub actions, see the CI files .github/ in this repository.

Because of docker and of permissions for the status directory /var/lib/kastenwesen, the build needs root privilege. If you want to use Vagrant in a custom CI setup or for developer testing to ensure that your config is correct before going into production, a sample Vagrantfile and kastenwesen_vagrant_test_build.py build script are provided.