Config file for docker-machine create

[jakirkham]

Is it possible to create a machine using a config file? This was true of boot2docker init and it would make it really convenient for being able to easily recreate the same VM. If it's not currently possible, I would like to request this feature.

[nathanleclaire]

At the moment, no. However, a lot of the work I'm doing now for 0.5.0 (libmachine) could potentially be used for such a file (and indeed is intended to enable such use cases), see for instance https://github.com/nathanleclaire/moby as an example of such a feature. It's definitely in mind.

Out of curiosity, which parameters from the existing boot2docker config do you think would be most useful to you?

[efrecon]

If creating your machines using a separate tool is ok to your use case, you could also look into machinery. It uses a simple YAML syntax to perform this kind of automation.

[0xjjpa]

One place where I could see this useful are development environments. Currently, using Vagrant with docker is pretty handy because I can just put a Vagrantfile into the source code and ask my team members to just do vagrant up; they don't need to wrap their heads around the concept of the host machine vs the actual containers, they just want to work and use something that reflects their changes in X or Y technology.

With a .dockermachine file, I can do the same and fully replace Vagrant with Docker Machine; in case of actual VM hosts management, there's people outside of my team that deals with that whenever we need to get out to production.

[jakirkham]

I guess the most important things to me are things like memory, cpus, disk space, driver, etc. Admittedly, they can be passed in by CLI, which I do now. However, I provide a wrapper script for internal users to start a base docker-machine instance with a particular docker image and go from there. As their setup could be in any configuration, it is nice to be able to compare their current config with the one that we expect. Also, being able to bundle a config file with this tool makes it easier to see and track requirements.

[joelhandwell]

Related with this issue if not duplicate ? #773