Cloud Native Blog - Container Solutions

minimesos 0.8.0 - Weave Scope, Consul & Registrator support

Written by Frank Scholten | Mar 30, 2016 1:34:24 PM

Today we released minimesos 0.8.0. You can install it using the usual installer command: curl -sSL https://minimesos.org/install | sh. The Docker images are available on Docker Hub and the jar is available via Jitpack. Minimesos is the experimentation and testing tool for Apache Mesos and features a Vagrant-like workflow and a Java API. The main highlights of this release are Weave Scope, Consul and Registrator which are supported out of the box. In addition to that we have improved our build and release process and fixed many small issues.

Weave Scope

Running `minimesos init` will generate the `minimesosFile` which now comes with an app {...} configuration block for Weave Scope, the container visualizer from WeaveWorks. This great tool shows how all containers running on a host are connected.

 

  marathon {
        imageName = "mesosphere/marathon"
        imageTag = "v0.15.3"
 
        // Add 'app { marathonJson = "" }' for every task you want to execute
        app {
            marathonJson = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ContainerSolutions/minimesos/27744df7071fb2d4ab15562bf2654ec37f4d539d/apps/weave-scope.json"
        }
 }
 
   
   

By default, Weave Scope is available on http://localhost:4040.

App configuration block

The app configuration inside the Marathon block can be used to launch any Marathon task right after the cluster is started. It expects a path, absolute or relative paths are supported, or a url.

Consul & Registrator

Consul from Hashicorp is a well known service discovery solution. Registrator from Gliderlabs is a service that automatically registers containers with Consul. Both these tools are now supported in minimesos by default. They are a part of the minimesos cluster and are started before Master, Agent and Zookeeper containers. When the minimesos cluster starts it prints out the Consul endpoint:

 
 
export MINIMESOS_ZOOKEEPER=zk://172.17.0.3:2181
export MINIMESOS_MASTER=http://172.17.0.4:5050
export MINIMESOS_MARATHON=http://172.17.0.5:8080
export MINIMESOS_CONSUL=http://172.17.0.7:8500
export MINIMESOS_CONSUL_IP=172.17.0.7
  
   
   

Want to know more about this feature? Remmelt has written about Consul minimesos integration in more detail.

New minimesos up command flag: --debug

Another feature we added is the --debug flag to the minimesos up command. This will print DEBUG logs from minimesos' internals.

Viewing Agent sandbox logs

Want to check the Agent logs? If you set mapAgentSandboxVolume to true in the minimesosFile the sandbox will be mapped to a directory under .minimesos/.

Long term vision

The long term vision for minimesos is being able to run isolated minimesos environments on top of a regular Mesos cluster. This means minimesos evolves from an experimentation and testing tool to an execution environment that can be used from a developers laptop all the way to the cloud. In order to move towards this goal we defined several milestones, with 0.8.0 being the first of them. See Github for more details. One of the next steps is addding more advanced service discovery with Weave Net.

Keep in touch

Thanks for reading! Keep in touch by commenting on the blog or talk to us at @minimesos and @ContainerSoluti. Check out the open issues on Github. Do you have an idea on how to improve minimesos? Please open an issue or add a PR at the minimesos Github repo. We hope you find minimesos useful. See you next time!