Running the ICM Container

Running the ICM Container

To launch ICM from the command line on a system on which Docker is installed, use the docker run command, which actually combines three separate Docker commands to do the following:

• Download the ICM image from the repository if it is not already present locally; if it is present, it is updated if necessary (this step can be done separately with the docker pull command).

• Creates a container from the ICM image (docker create command).

• Start the ICM container (docker start command).

For example:

docker run --name icm --init -d -it --cap-add SYS_TIME intersystems/icm:latest-em

The -i option makes the command interactive and the -t option opens a pseudo-TTY, giving you command line access to the container. From this point on, you can interact with ICM by invoking ICM commands on the pseudo-TTY command line. The --cap-add SYS_TIME option allows the container to interact with the clock on the host system, avoiding clock skew that may cause the cloud service provider to reject API commands.

The ICM container includes a /Samples directory that provides you with samples of the elements required by ICM for provisioning, configuration, and deployment. The /Samples directory makes it easy for you to provision and deploy using ICM out of the box. Eventually, you can use locations outside the container to store these elements and InterSystems IRIS licenses, and either mount those locations as external volumes when you launch ICM (see Manage data in DockerOpens in a new tab in the Docker documentation) or copy files into the ICM container using the docker cp command.

Of course, the ICM image can also be run by custom tools and scripts, and this can help you accomplish goals such as making these external locations available within the container, and saving your configuration files and your state directory (which is required to remove the infrastructure and services you provision) to persistent storage outside the container as well. A script, for example, could do the latter by capturing the current working directory in a variable and using it to mount that directory as a storage volume when running the ICM container, as follows:

#!/bin/bash
clear

# extract the basename of the full pwd path
MOUNT=$(basename $(pwd))
docker run --name icm -d -it --volume $PWD:$MOUNT --cap-add SYS_TIME intersystems/icm:latest-em 
printf "\nExited icm container\n"
printf "\nRemoving icm container...\nContainer removed:  "
docker rm icm

You can mount multiple external storage volumes when running the ICM container (or any other). When deploying InterSystems IRIS containers, ICM automatically formats, partitions, and mounts several storage volumes; for more information, see Storage Volumes Mounted by ICM in the “ICM Reference” chapter.