Planning your own IBM Integration Bus image using Docker

When you run IBM Integration Bus in Docker, there are several requirements to consider. The sample build process, using the supplied Dockerfile (at https://github.com/ot4i/iib-docker) provides a way to satisfy those requirements. If you would prefer to use your own image, you must consider how the requirements are handled.

Process supervision:

When you run a Docker container, you run 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 Integration Bus integration node requires some processes to be running, so you must ensure that your main process stays active as long as the node is running. It is good practice to check that the node is active from this process, which you can do by performing administrative queries. If you use the sample that is provided for IBM Integration Bus, at https://github.com/ot4i/iib-docker, you can see that this task is done by the script iib_manage.sh, which includes the following code:

monitor()
{
	echo "----------------------------------------"
	echo "Running - stop container to exit"
	# Loop forever by default - container must be stopped manually.
	# Here is where you can add in conditions controlling when your container will exit - e.g. check for existence of specific processes stopping or errors being reported
	while true; do
		sleep 1
	done
}