This guide is designed to get you up and running with nscale on OS X as quickly as possible. If you don't have all of the below requirements you can use the OS X Setup Guide to prepare your system.

• Node
• Git
• Docker
• nscale

We'll be dealing with a docker container, on OS X docker works via boot2docker, which is purpose built virtualbox image supplying a linux environment for docker to run on.

To start boot2docker we do:

boot2docker up

Upon running boot2docker it may instruct us to run a command, something like

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.59.103:2375

We'll need to export the DOCKER_HOST variable with whatever address boot2docker gives us, this allows the docker command on OS X to interface with docker insde the boot2docker virtual machine.

The nsd executable is a command line client app, it interacts with a kernel server. Most nsd commands rely entirely on the kernel server, so the first thing we need to do is start it:

nsd server start

This command must be run in the same terminal that we ran boot2docker up and exported the DOCKER_HOST in.

In a production scenario (or as a convenience) we could create a small script to run the kernel server on start up.

See the OS X Setup Guide for more information on Docker.

To get up and running straight away we're going to clone an existing system, for a longer explanation of how to get started from scratch see Getting Started From Scratch

We'll be using nearForm's canonical "Hello World" example.

To clone the system we do,

nsd system clone [email protected]:nearform/nscaledemo.git

It doesn't matter what directory we're in when we do this. nscale manages any imported files internally - we simply interact with the system those files represent through the nsd command line interface.

Let's make sure our system was installed

nsd system list

This should output something like this

Name                           Id
nscaledemo                        e1144711-47bb-5931-9117-94f01dd20f6f

Our cloned system has two containers (see Containers), let's list them:

nsd container list e1144711-47bb-5931-9117-94f01dd20f6f

The nsd help for nsd container list requires a systemid, however we can also reference our system by name

nsd container list nscaledemo

In both cases, nsd should output

Name                 Type            Id                                                 Version         Dependencies
Machine              virtualbox      85d99b2c-06d0-5485-9501-4d4ed429799c                               ""
web                  boot2docker     9ddc6c027-9ce2-5fdg-9936-696d2b3789bb              0.0.1           {}

Our Machine is a virtualbox container, a virtually emulated operating system. This can be thought of as the equivalent of a physical server, or a "machine" in a virtual hosting plan (such as AWS).

The second container (web) is a Docker container, this an isolated OS-like environment that can be run on a host system (in this case our Machine).

So, for this system, the Machine container contains the web container, which contains a microservice (see Microservices) which provides a web server, that responds to requests with an HTML file containing "Hello World!".

nsd container build nscaledemo web

Any time we build a container, our system is modified, this is reflected in the revision list

nsd revision list nscaledemo

To deploy our system in it's latest state, we take the top revision number use it with revision deploy. So if the latest revision id was 2a934f8e9cf8c98f2ac we would do:

nsd revision deploy nscaledemo 2a934f8e9cf8c98f2ac

If that was successful, if we list our revisions again with nsd revision list nscaledemo the revision we have deployed should have true in the deployed column:

revision             deployed who                                                     time                      description
2a934f8e9cf8c98f2ac… true     davidmarkclements <[email protected]>                                2014-09-03T09:15:23.000Z  built container: 920718f8542201f9d8daf2f430ce0001…

Finally, we can request a page from our web containers web server, we just need to know the address.

The web microservice is an express app that listens on port 8000.

This port is mapped to the host machine, which in our case is boot2docker, so to access our webserver we find out the boot2docker IP address and make a request at port 8000.

endpoint=http://$(boot2docker ip):8000

curl $endpoint

open $endpoint

We should see "Hello World!".

• Getting Started From Scratch
• Getting Started Migrating