Deploy Chalk globally via Docker

Automatically get visibility for every Docker build

Summary

One of the biggest challenges to automatically tying together information you have about production to information you have about source code is the ease of deployment at scale.

Nobody wants to deploy one repository at a time, and if you do ask people to add things to their pipelines, it will probably be forgotten or misused.

With Chalk™, when your teams build via Docker, you can easily set up Chalk on your build systems to automatically operate on every docker build. All you need to do is:

1. Install a configured Chalk binary.
2. Set up a global alias for docker, having it call Chalk.

That's it. Chalk figures the rest out.

Steps

Step 1: Install a configured binary.

The easiest way to get Chalk is to download a pre-built binary from our release page. It's a self-contained binary with no dependencies to install.

Configuring Chalk is also easy. For the sake of example, we will use our compliance configuration.

If Chalk is in your current directory, run:

./chalk load https://chalkdust.io/compliance-docker.c4m

When you install Chalk on your build systems, we recommend putting it in the same directory where your docker executable is, though anywhere in the default PATH is fine.

Step 2: Add a global alias

You could now deploy chalk and ask everyone to run it by invoking chalk before their docker commands. But that's easy to forget. It's really better to automatically call chalk when invoking Docker.

You can do this easily with a global alias. Your build systems will have a global file for bash configuration, which, these days, is almost always /etc/bash.bashrc (but if it's not there, then it should be at/etc/bashrc).

This file runs when any bash shell starts. All you need to add to this file is:

alias docker=chalk

💀 Some people add global aliases to /etc/profile.d, but we do not recommend this, because some (non-login) shells will not use this.

Once you add this, you can log out and log back in to make the alias take effect, our simply source the file:

source /etc/bash.bashrc

Now, whenever a new bash shell gets created that starts a docker process, they'll be automatically configured to call chalk instead. The way we've configured chalk, when it doesn't see any of its own commands, it knows to use the Chalk docker command.

We always run the Docker command intended by the user, but we also collect and report on environmental info.

You can also ask Chalk to add automatic data reporting on startup to built containers if you like, as described in our how-to on building an application inventory

Our cloud platform

We have tried to make doing everything with Chalk as easy as possible, our cloud platform makes it even easier. It is designed for enterprise deployments, and provides additional functionality including prebuilt configurations to solve common tasks, prebuilt integrations to enrich your data, a built-in query editor, an API and a lot more.

There are both free and paid plans. You can join the waiting list for early access.