I’ve recently deployed the latest version of Behold, which is now available on the Docker Hub. There were a number of changes brought in to v0.0.3, with new new UI being the most immediately noticeable difference. A changelog is also now available for the project.

The other big change is the inclusion of log output for running containers. This also includes a plugin for transforming the ANSI colour coded output in to HTML, so hopefully the log output isn’t horrendously ugly.

Viewing Behold’s own container log

There are some instances I’ve noticed where strange characters start appearing in the log, where log lines will begin with 4s, Gs, )s in the browser, but not within the terminal when I run docker logs .... An example of this is from the logging output of Gitlab Server, where the app is seeing the following at the start of some lines.

[ '\u0001',
  '\u0000',
  '\u0000',
  '\u0000',
  '\u0000',
  '\u0000',
  '\u0000',
  '4',
  '=',
  '=',
  '>' ]

The 4==> is visible, but I’m only expecting to see the ==>.

Digital Styles

I migrated away from Picnic CSS and began using mdbootstrap. This was a surprisingly easy change, and gives me immediate access to a lot more components. This also had the upshot of not requiring Bower anymore, simplifying the build process.

Invisible Changes

As I’ve worked on this project I’ve learnt a little more about javascript, and in doing so, immediately nullified that slightly simplified build process. Dealing with Promises on their own was a bit painful, and I pined for some async/await syntax to ease that pain. I evaluated a few options, and wound up going with Babel to transpile my javascript. This didn’t take too long to set up, especially since I was already exporting all my javascript to an output directory, so adding another step to the pipeline wasn’t that difficult.

I’ve also created my own wrapper around the Dockerode client, which handles a lot of the functionality that I was repeating within the summary and details views for both containers and images.

Project Changes

I’ve also started managing Behold a little more formally. I’ve moved all my Behold work to its own Trello board, which was necessitated by the number of changes I had going in flight at once, and the amount of ideas I was generating while working on Behold. I had initially attempted to use GitHub projects, but found that it was just a poor analogue of Trello.

Planned Changes

I’m looking to improve some of the Docker details for Behold, namely moving off of the node:slim build to the full one, and injecting the project version in to the Dockerfile rather than duplicating it in both the package.json and Dockerfile.

I’m also going to look a little bit more in to displaying the links between containers, and potentially will be revisiting one of the earlier layouts that I discussed in the previous blog post.