Planning your own IBM MQ queue manager image using Docker

Use this information to configure IBM® MQ using Docker. There are several requirements to consider when running an IBM MQ queue manager in Docker. The sample Docker image provides a way to handle these requirements, but if you want to use your own image, you need to consider how these requirements are handled.

Process supervision

When you run a Docker container, you are essentially running a single process (PID 1 inside the container), which can later spawn child processes.

If the main process ends, Docker stops the container. An IBM MQ queue manager requires multiple processes to be running in the background.

For this reason, you need to make sure that your main process stays active as long as the queue manager is running. It is good practice to check that the queue manager is active from this process, for example, by performing administrative queries.

Populating /var/mqm

Docker containers must be configured with /var/mqm as a Docker volume.

When you do this, the directory of the volume is empty when the container first starts. This directory is usually populated at installation time, but installation and runtime are separate environments when using Docker.

To solve this, when your container starts, you can use the amqicdir command to populate /var/mqm when it runs for the first time.