Container Quickstart

This tutorial walks through the shortest path from a container image on your laptop to a running container on a Trustgrid appliance, with a port mapping you can reach from its LAN. If you already have a Trustgrid appliance enrolled and a Docker image you want to deploy, this should take about 10 minutes.

What you need

• A Trustgrid organization with at least one enrolled appliance.
• Permissions: repositories::modify, node-exec::modify, node-exec::compute on the target node or cluster.
• Docker on a linux/amd64 machine. We’ll use the public nginx:alpine as the example image.

1. Push the image to your Trustgrid registry

Each Trustgrid organization gets a private container registry. Your registry path is:

docker.<your-domain>/<your-namespace>/<image>:<tag>

For example, on the org with domain acme.trustgrid.io the path for an image called myapp tagged v1 is docker.acme.trustgrid.io/acme.trustgrid.io/myapp:v1. Your exact namespace is shown on the Repositories page.

Authenticate. From the Trustgrid portal, navigate to Repositories and copy the Docker Login command — it includes a short-lived token. Paste it in your terminal:

docker login -u trustgrid -p <token> https://docker.<your-domain>

From your amd64 host, push the image:

docker pull nginx:alpine
docker tag nginx:alpine docker.acme.trustgrid.io/acme.trustgrid.io/nginx:alpine
docker push docker.acme.trustgrid.io/acme.trustgrid.io/nginx:alpine

Verify the tag landed by navigating to Repositories → nginx in the portal. You should see the alpine tag listed with its digest. If it doesn’t appear, the push was not linux/amd64 — push from an amd64 host.

2. Create the container

Navigate to the cluster or node where you want to run the container, then Compute → Container Management → Containers, and click Add Container.

Fill in:

Click Save. The portal returns to the container list with nginx shown as Enabled.

3. Expose a port

By default the container is reachable only from the appliance itself. To make it reachable from the appliance’s local network, add a host port mapping.

1. Click into nginx, then Network on the left sidebar.

2. Under Host Port Mappings click Add.

3. Fill in:

   Field	Value
   Protocol	tcp
   Host Interface	The LAN-facing NIC on the appliance (e.g. ens192). Check Networking → Interfaces if you’re not sure.
   Host Port	8080
   Container Port	80

4. Click Save.

4. Wait for it to start

Go back to the container list at node scope (not cluster scope — runtime state lives at the node scope). The container’s State column transitions through Initializing → Running within a minute or two for a small image.

5. Reach it

From any host on the same LAN as the appliance’s host interface (e.g. an admin workstation):

curl http://<appliance-LAN-IP>:8080/

You should see the default nginx welcome page.

6. Verify and explore

From the container’s detail page at node scope, the action bar at the top has:

• Start / Stop — restart the container without changing its configuration.
• Logs — open a streaming viewer for the container’s stdout / stderr.
• Terminal — open a shell inside the running container.

These are described in Container Tools.

Next steps

• Expose the container over a virtual network so peer Trustgrid nodes can reach it without going through the LAN.
• Add a Health Check so the container is flagged in the portal if it stops responding.
• Persist data with a bind mount or volume.