Customizing App Connect Professional Docker containers

The first article IBM App Connect Professional: Docker introduction explains how to launch App Connect Professional as a Docker container. This article explains the various customizations that can be done when you build our own App Connect Professional Docker image.

There are two ways to launch App Connect Professional as a Docker container:

• Use the App Connect Professional Docker image running on Ubuntu 16.04 that is provided by IBM (7.5.3.0-WS-ACP-_64-builtDockerImage.tar)
• Build your own Docker image by using App Connect Professional software (7.5.3.0-WS-ACP-_64-docker.tar.gz)

We will be using the second option where we customize and build a new Docker image.

Download and extract App Connect Professional

1. Download the App Connect Professional software (7.5.3.0-WS-ACP-
2. Copy the file to the Linux machine where Docker is installed.
3. On the Linux server, extract the TAR file by using the following command:
   tar –xvzf FILE_NAME
4. Navigate to the directory castiron_docker.

When you build your own Docker image, you can customize the following settings.

• Build a Docker image with a different OS
  1. In the directory castiron_docker, edit the file named Dockerfile.
  2. Edit the FROM tag (first line) and change the base Docker image to the one that you want to use, then save the changes.
     Here are some examples:
     FROM ubuntu:18.04
FROM centos
  3. Update the Docker file to use the right commands as per the base OS being used.
  4. Navigate to the parent directory of castiron_docker and create the Docker image by running the following command:
     docker build --no-cache -t ibmappconnect:7.5.3.0 castiron_docker
  5. Run the docker images command to verify that the image is available. You should see the following output:
     REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
ibmappconnect 7.5.3.0 f931edf5e533 7 minutes ago 1.37GB
ibmjava 8-sdk 115d3b07ebf5 42 hours ago 360MB
  6. Launch the container by using the steps defined in IBM App Connect Professional: Docker introduction.
• Load and start projects when the container is started
  1. Navigate to the projects directory inside castiron_docker.
  2. Copy the App Connect Professional projects (.par files) into the projects directory.
  3. In the projects directory, create a file with the name projects.cfg and provide the list of projects that need to be loaded and/or started. Example syntax of the file is provided below. Each line represents one project and it has two or three parameters separated by a comma. The first parameter represents the project file name, the second parameter represents the version number of the project, and the third parameter (which is optional) represents whether to start the project. A value of START starts the project when the container is launched. If START is not provided, the project is deployed only and will not be started.
     Example syntax of projects.cfg
project1.par,1.0,START
project2.par,2018.2.1
project3.par,2.0,START
project4.par,1.0,START
  4. If the projects.cfg file isn’t provided, and only the project files (.par files) are copied to the projects directory, the projects will be deployed in the container but not started.
  5. Change to the parent directory of castiron_docker and create the Docker image by running the following command:
     docker build --no-cache -t ibmappconnect:7.5.3.0 castiron_docker
  6. Run the docker images command to verify that the image is available. You should see the following output:
     REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
ibmappconnect 7.5.3.0 f931edf5e533 7 minutes ago 1.37GB
ibmjava 8-sdk 115d3b07ebf5 42 hours ago 360MB
  7. Launch the container by using the steps defined in IBM App Connect Professional: Docker introduction.
  8. Log in to the Web Management Console and check the projects.

The following customizations are also planned in App Connect Professional docker container:

• Load users when the containers are launched
• Load keys and certificates when the containers are launched
• Load third-party libraries during startup
• Load staging database tables and data when the container is launched
• Load secure connector configurations

This article is written by testing with App Connect Professional version 7.5.3 latest build and using Docker version 18.09.0