Bocker: Docker implemented in around 100 lines of Bash (2015)

I wonder why Bocker makes the frontpage so often. Is Docker still that controversial even in 2024? Why people don't recognize that it actually brought something useful (mainly, software distribution and easy of "run everywhere") to the table?

It's possible it's not climbing the front page to slight docker, but rather that people are seeing that docker is something useful and want to know how it works. Bocker can be an entrypoint into the technologies.

It's just a learning tool to see how docker works.

Docker is just a combination of kernel tech that already exists. Namespaces, cgroups, and union file systems and probably few others.

Yes it's a wonderful little read. Besides without volumes and port forwarding few would ever deploy this to production.

The reason people use docker over Podman and rolling their own is because of the ecosystem and ubiquity of docker.

It hits the frontpage often because people assume that Docker is this super complex thing, but (at its most fundamental), it's actually quite elegant and understandable, which is interesting - a perfect HN story, in fact.

I'm bringing overlayfs to people at my company to save time on a lenghty CI process, and they are in awe at the speedup. But after demo-ing it to a few people I realized they could just use / (I could have brought them) docker.

How overlayfs speeds up CI processes?

It is kinda complex, but all the complexity is in Linux, ~none is in 'Docker'.

Exactly. "Docker" is boring, everyone uses it, everyone knows it, no one really wants to rewrite it (on Linux) except for parochial infighting or religious license reasons.

But Linux containers[1] are actually fascinating stuff, really powerful, and (even for the Docker experts) poorly understood. The point of Bocker isn't "see how easy it is to rewrite Docker" it's "See how simple and powerful the container ecosystem is!".

[1] Also btrfs snapshots, which are used very cleverly in Bocker.

I like doing similar tricks with zfs snapshots for containers on linux and jails on fBSD.

(this is not intended to start a filesystem argument, I'm doing it with zfs because I already know zfs and it's available on both of the OSen I care about; if you already know btrfs and are only running things that support it, clearly you should use that for the exact same reasons ;)

Huge (32gb) git repo full of junk and small files. No power to change it. Created a cron job that updates and rebuilds every 24hrs. Clients can clone it instantly with overlay instead of a 30m checkout and build each time. Not to mention disk space savings