Blink and you might miss some of the most interesting developments around Docker these days. Aside from progress on Docker itself, many other useful projects have been built on top of Docker or been empowered by Docker. In many cases, these tools take advantage of workflow techniques and deployment strategies that Docker makes possible.
Here are eight open-source creations that get a boost from Docker or give Docker a boost, leveraging Docker for specific use cases or making Docker easier to work with.
Dusty
A Docker-powered, MIT-licensed development environment, Dusty is intended to improve on the use of Docker Compose or Vagrant for managing containers. The developers behind Dusty claim, for example, that Dusty has a simpler specs model than Docker Compose, and that it handles version-based isolation of app dependencies and updates of services better than Vagrant. Dusty also allows tests to be created as part of a spec for an environment, and makes it possible for common multi-step procedures to be made into an easily invoked script.
Gockerize
Here’s one for fans of the Go language. Gockerize is a BSD-licensed tool for building static Go binaries and packaging them into minimal Go containers. Created by the folks behind AeroFS, Gockerize includes features like “the ability to automatically apply a set of patches to the Golang standard library; something which, while very rarely needed, can be a life-saver,” according to the blog post introducing the project. Gockerize doesn’t rely on much externally—only Go, Docker 1.5 or higher, and the Bash shell.
