Vessel

Vessel automates the setup & use of dockerized development environments

Download for Mac
Version 0.3.2 — for OSX 10.8 or later

Designed to improve development velocity.

Vessel leverages Vagrant, CoreOS, Docker, Consul, and GitHub to ease the process for setting up complex development environments.

We built Vessel with one thing in mind; it should be easier for people to get work done. With many different applications in our environment, we started to wonder if there was a better way to accomplish that than our existing Vagrant+Puppet development environment.

As we started to explore the use of Docker containers for our development environment it quickly became clear that we would need a tool to automate the process of standing up a virtual machine and starting up all of the containers any given application would depend upon.

Screenshots

The Overview tab displays the current state of the Virtual Machine and its containers.

Select the applications and dependencies required for your environment in the Containers tab.

While you shouldn’t need to, you can tweak the Vagrant settings in the Vagrant Settings tab.

The Config Preview tab lets you take a sneak peak at the Vagrant and CoreOS configuration.

When starting or stopping a virtual machine, you can keep an eye on the progress.

If something goes wrong, the Logs tab is a good place to look for both Vagrant and Vessel errors.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Vessel’s system requirements?
Vessel requires a recent version of Vagrant (1.6 or newer), either VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion, and Git or OSX Command Line Tools.
How do I customize what containers are available?
Fork or create your own manifest repository. For more information on creating a manifest, see the documentation.
Can Vessel run in Windows or on Linux?
While it's technically possible, there are not currently any builds available for these platforms. If you’d like to help with Linux or Windows support for vessel, please get in touch!
Do I have to use Consul in my containers?
Consul is used to support service discovery within the docker containers and across Virtual Machines. You’re free to use whatever discovery service you’d like, but out of the box, we have chosen to use Consul.
What about etcd instead of Consul?
Vessel ensures that etcd is started and given a unique token for every fresh virtual machine instance. For the boot process, etcd is used to coordinate consul bootstrapping across nodes. There should be no problem with your containers using the same etcd instance.
What is Vessel written in?
Vessel is built using Electron, the core of GitHub's Atom editor and is written primarily in CoffeeScript.
Can I contribute to Vessel?
Absolutely. We’d love enhancements, bug-fixes, and any other contributions in the form of pull requests.