Inception

Inception is a containerization project using Docker. There is a potentially new things to learn in this project, and it can get quite overwhelming; this readme is intended as a guide to help you start out.

Pedagogy goals

Inception's goal is to teach you:

• the basics & good practice of containers, through Docker and docker-compose;
• the logic of microservices architecture;
• webserving and webshosting.

Don't be fooled: this as much about databases and webserving that it is about containerization.

Inception can be a frustrating project, because for a while nothing will work until something does. Don't be discouraged ! There's a lot of interresting stuff to be learned here.

Running in a virtual machine

Inception is supposed to be done in a virtual machine. Take a minute to set yours up, and take time to consider the following:

Heed the following advice:

• You do not need a graphical interface. Everything on your VM can be accessed through SSH:
  • VScode via the Microsoft Remote SSH extentension
  • Your browser can redirect its requests to your VM through a SOCKS5 proxy and SSH tunneling (see SSH is your friend).
  • You can work in your own terminal via SSH.
• The lighter your VM, the less lag you will have. I recommend using Alpine as your VM OS, but that's just me.

---

SSH is your friend

For this part, you should brush up on SSH functionnalities: here is a good blog post about it.

• You can use SSH tunnelling (static port forwarding, -L) to connect to your VM's localhost address. This will allow you to connect to your website directly via your host machine. This is a great article about it.
• In order to access localhost at the address required by the subject (login.42.fr), you browser needs to resolve the domain name. You can't do that if you don't have root access, which we don't at school. A workaround is to set up a proxy in order to redirect the host requests to be resolved on your VM.
• A proxy is a intermediary server that stands between your machine and the remote machine. It's often used in the context of security and anonymity (since it shields you IP from the destination), but in our case it mostly allows us to bypass the issue of DNS configuration. I used a SOCKS5 proxy, which is set up using ssh -D, and a few configuration steps in your browser of choice. You may read more about it in this guide.