We are excited to announce the first release of a Docker mixin for Porter! 🐳 Mixins are critical building blocks for bundles, and we hope the Docker mixin will help ease the process of composing bundles. The Docker mixin installs Docker and provides the Docker CLI within bundles. Prior to the creation of this mixin, in order to use Docker within your bundle, you would have to create a custom Dockerfile and install Docker.

Sometimes you need a hammer, and that hammer happens to be a whale 🐳. We all use containers as part of our pipeline: building images, running a one-off command in a utility container, spinning up a test environment to verify your application, or even more creative tasks that you have already containerized. Well now you can reuse all that hard work and logic from within your bundles! Let’s walk through using my favorite container, docker/whalesay, in a bundle.

Two of Porter’s great strengths lie in composability and extensibility. Mixins represent the building blocks for composing a bundle, offering functionality that can be utilized during the runtime of a bundle, and Plugins represent swappable backend storage solutions, enabling distributed, Day 2 bundle instance management. (Be sure to read Carolyn Van Slyck’s recent post around Plugins and Collaboration.) The default installation of Porter includes a handful of useful mixins, including:

One tenet of working on a great team, is that no one deploys alone. I may have originally deployed our application, but that doesn’t mean that I am responsible for patching it until the end of time, or until I run away screaming. I am excited to announce that Porter now fully supports teams managing a bundle collaboratively! 🙌 🔷 Sally deploys the application on Tuesday using secrets stored in the team’s Key Vault.