Let’s say you need to Host an application and make it available to the public, you need someplace to host it. In the past, you would need to host this on a Dedicated Server or a Physical Computer.

Then, the age of “Virtualization” came in. Hosting applications on VM became popular due to its advantages like: Easy maintenance, Multiple OS environments can exist simultaneously on the same machine, isolated from each other and availability and convenient recovery.

But the above two computing services still cannot solve one thing — heavy Operating System usage. Let’s think about operating systems like Windows, Linux (RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc), and macOS. These OS s are large in size and can easily go over 1 Gigabyte, also known as “OS image.”

However, your application may only have an approximated size of 300 MB to start with. So, why would you want a “virtual machine”that has the size of 1 GB + when your application is much much less than that? That’s where the concept of “container” comes in to fix that.

Is this the only issue Docker solves? Definitely No, the picture below explains it all!

The application works fine in our Laptop, but it doesn't work on Production server or a user's machine due to the difference in computing the environment between the two.

Docker is a platform that packages an application and all its dependencies together in the form of containers. This containerization aspect of Docker ensures that the application works in any environment.

Instructions to Install SDP on Docker (Attached a Word and Pdf doc)

2)Download ServiceDeskplus .bin for Linux on the host machine ( Windows) from: https://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/download.html?opDownload_indexbnr

3)Create a folder “SDP” and move the .bin file 

Here, this will help to share the folder with the docker container.

For illustration, we have used CentOS image on Docker. However, the steps remain the same for other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian. etc.

Docker: 19.03.8

Host OS: Windows 10

Container : CentOS:7

Once Docker is installed and running,

Type ls to find the bin file for installation

./ManageEngine_ServiceDesk_Plus_64bits.bin --console
Give the permission for execution with ‘chmod +x’

Run the command as shown below

From this stage, the installation steps remain the same as how we normally install SDP on Linux as mentioned https://help.servicedeskplus.com/introduction/installation-linux.html

Continue the Onscreen instructions to proceed and in case if you encounter an error as shown below- it is safe to ignore.

Step 4: Start ServiceDesk plus:

Command : ./run.sh

Step 5 : Configuring ServiceDesk plus as a Service

Create a file inside /etc/init.d/

Command :$ touch /etc/init.d/servicedesk

Give permission for execution

Command :chmod 755 /etc/init.d/servicedesk

Access the startup script from: https://help.servicedeskplus.com/servicedesk.txt

open the file with your text editor, nano, emacs, vim, etc…

copy the contents and paste it on the newly created file

$ nano /etc/init.d/servicedesk

 Change this line

.MDIR=/home/guest/servicedesk/AdventNet/ME/ServiceDesk/bin

 To 

.MDIR=/opt/ManageEngine/ServiceDesk/bin

Now save the file.

Now you can start Service desk plus using the command : $ /etc/init.d/servicedesk start

To exit the container without stopping it - use : Ctlr + p and q

Do not use Control D or the command #exit since this will stop the container.

Few useful Docker commands:

To start a container

docker start <containername>

To login to the container

docker attach <container_name>

To stop the container

$ docker <container_name> or <container_id> stop

To remove a container

$ docker rm <container_name> or <container_id>