I came across a very interesting post this morning on using Play With Docker (PWD) to let people try out applications directly from your GitHub repository. If you’ve not tried out Play With Docker before (or it’s companion site, Play with Kubernetes), they’re very useful resources which let you try things out in disposable Docker and Kubernetes environments. Handy for training courses amongst other things.
What I hadn’t realised before was that you can pass a Docker compose file in as a parameter to a PWD URL and have it automatically spin up an instance of that stack. This model seems super-useful for trying out new applications in disposable environments and works well with web applications, as we’ll see.
So having read the post I thought I’d try adding a sample instance for my Dockerized Security Tools project. From the tools I’ve got in there at the moment, the best candidate for a try out looked to be Dradis-CE.
I knocked up a very basic Docker compose file for it, and then put a button referencing it in the Readme, with this as the result.
If you click that button and then login (you’ll need a Docker Hub account for this, but they’re free to create), PWD will launch the application. The only other trick to trying it out is that you need to click a link in the PWD interface to access the exposed application.
There will be a grey oval next to the IP address at the top with the exposed port number (in this case 3000). Clicking that link should take you into a running instance of Dradis! The first page load will be a little slow, but after that it should work just fine.
I could see this having a number of use cases, things like running up instances of OWASP Juice Shop to try out tools or similar.
The runtime is limited to four hours, but that should be plenty for a quick look round a tool to see what it’s like.
