Recent development efforts in the Apache Knox community have been focused on making it easier to run and manage Knox in container environments.

The intent of this post is to briefly highlight two public projects that provide the ability to get Knox up and running in a Docker container.

knox-docker provides the ability to get an instance of a released version of Knox up and running in a container. Releases prior to v1.0.0 will be more difficult to use since you have to bash into the resulting container(s) to effect configuration (including topology) changes. Releases beginning with v1.0.0 are a bit easier to manage due to the associated Admin UI and API enhancements.

knox-dev-docker provides the ability to get an instance of Knox from a development branch up and running in a container. You can point this to any branch of the Apache repo or any fork of that repo. The Knox sources will be downloaded from the specified source branch, and built to produce an instance of Knox in a container.


Both of these projects leverage docker-compose to create a container for the demo LDAP server and a container for Knox, but you can modify the existing docker-compose files (or create your own) to add Knox instances or remove the demo LDAP server (for example).