dcrx-api 0.0.8

A RESTful implementation of the DCRX Docker library.

dcrx-api

Dcrx-api is a RESTful implementation of the dcrx library, allowing you to create Docker images on request! Dcrx-api extends dcrx, providing integrations with the Docker API and dcrx that allow images to be built by making REST requests.

Dcrx-api also includes basic JWT authorization and user management (no-RBAC), and is intended to be deployed as an internal-facing service. dcrx also provides OpenAPI documentation to make getting started intuitive, and features integrations with SQLite, Postgres, and MySQL for storing and managing users.

Setup and Installation

DCRX is available both as a Docker image and as a PyPi package. For local use, we recommend using PyPi, Python 3.10+, and a virtual environment. To install, run:

python -m venv ~/.dcrx && \
source ~/.dcrx/bin/activate && \
pip install dcrx-api

To get the Docker image, run:

docker pull adalundhe/dcrx-api:latest

Getting Started

Dcrx requires a slew of environmental variables in order to run correctly. These include:

DCRX_API_WORKERS=10 # Number of workers to use for Job executor. Default is the number os OS threads.

DCRX_API_TOKEN_EXPIRATION_MINUTES=10 # Time in minutes for JWT authorization token to expire. Default is 30.

DCRX_API_SECRET_KEY=testingthis # Initial secret used to hash user passwords.

DCRX_API_AUTH_ALGORITHM=HS256 # Algorithm to use for hashing user passwords.

DCRX_API_DATABASE_TYPE=sqlite # Type of database to use. Default is sqlite and options are mysql, asyncpg, and sqlite.

DCRX_API_DATABASE_USER=admin # Username used for database connection authentication

DCRX_API_DATABASE_PASSWORD=test1234 # Password used for database connection authentrication

DCRX_API_DATABASE_NAME=dcrx # Name of database to use for storing users. Default is dcrx.

DCRX_API_DATABASE_URI=sqlite+aiosqlite:///dcrx # URL/URI of SQL database for storing users

DOCKER_REGISTRY_URI=https://docker.io/v1/myrepo/test-images # Docker image registry to push images to.

DOCKER_REGISTRY_USERNAME=test # Username to authenticate Docker pushes to the provided registry.

DOCKER_REGISTRY_PASSWORD=test-repo-password # Password to authenticate Docker pushes to the provided registry.

Prior to starting the server, we recommend seeding the database with an initial user. To do so, run the command:

dcrx-api database initialize --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD --first-name $FIRST_NAME --last-name $LAST_NAME --email $EMAIL

If you've chosen to run the Docker image, this step is taken care of for you, with the default user being:

username: admin
password: dcrxadmin1*
first-name: admin
last-name: user
email: [e-mail]

Next run:

dcrx-api server run

and navigate to localhost:2277/docs, where you'll find dcrx-api's OpenAPI documentation.

Authenticating and Building an Image

From here, we'll need to authenticate using the initial user we created above. Open the tab for /users/login, and for the username and password fields enter the username and password of the initial user, then click Execute. A 200 status response containg the initial user's username and id should return.

Next navigate to the /jobs/images/create tab. As before, we'll need to fill out some data. Go ahead and copy paste the below into the input for the request body:

{
  "name": "hello-world",
  "tag": "latest",
  "layers": [
    {
      "layer_type": "stage",
      "base": "python",
      "tag": "3.11-slim",
    },
    {
        "layer_type": "entrypoint",
        "command": [
            "echo",
            "Hello world!"
        ]
    }
  ]
}

A dcrx-api image build request requires, at-minimum, a name, tag and one or more layer objects, which will be processed and build in-order of appearance. Note that each layer object almost exactly corresponds to its dcrx call. The above corresponds exactly to:

from dcrx import Image

hello_world = Image('hello-world')

hello_world.stage(
    'python',
    '3.11-slim'
).entrypoint([
    'echo',
    'Hello world!'
])

Go ahead and submit the request via the Execute button. This will start a job to build the specified image and push it to the repository specified in dcrx-api's environmental variables.

Note that dcrx-api doesn't wait for the image to be built, instead returning a JobMetadata response with a status code of 200, including the job_id. Building images is time-intensive and could potentially bog down a server, so dcrx-api builds and pushes images in the background. We can use the job_id of a Job to make further GET requests to the /jobs/images/{job_id}/get endpoint to monitor and check how our job is progressing. If we need to cancel a job for any reason, we can simple make a DELETE request to /jobs/images/{job_id}/cancel.

Running the Docker Image

To run the Docker image, we recommend first creating a .env file with the required environment variables noted above. Then run the image:

docker run -p 2277:2277 --env-file .env -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock dcrx-api:latest

Notes and Gotchas

1. Does dcrx-api require a volume to run? - Yes. While dcrx-api builds images in-memory, Docker still (frustratingly) requires that a physical file be present in the build directory. This means that, if running dcrx-api in Docker or via Kubernetes, you will need to have a volume with the correct permissions mounted.

2. Does the dcrx-api Docker image require root? - Currently yes. The dcrx-api image is based on the latest version of Docker's dind image, which runs as and requires root privlidges. We're working on getting the rootless version of dind working though!