...and it was probably around 1.5K lines early in its life.
But that misses the point. This is very helpful for understanding how a Docker-like system works since it's a small and mostly self-contained implementation. You can read through the entire thing and fully understand it.
It only cheats in the container registry handling where it pulls in github.com/google/go-containerregistry and for the network setup where it uses github.com/vishvananda/netlink. The rest is done in terms of Go stdlib and syscalls.
Early Docker used external utilities (lxc, iptables) and had the client/server stuff already so it's not as straightforward.
Yep. Docker is famously written Go. The only reason I wrote this is as an educational tool to discuss how containers under Linux really work. It’s self-contained (pun unintended) except for the usage of the go-containerregistry package, which anyway does stuff unrelated to how containers are managed on Linux.
But that misses the point. This is very helpful for understanding how a Docker-like system works since it's a small and mostly self-contained implementation. You can read through the entire thing and fully understand it.
It only cheats in the container registry handling where it pulls in github.com/google/go-containerregistry and for the network setup where it uses github.com/vishvananda/netlink. The rest is done in terms of Go stdlib and syscalls.
Early Docker used external utilities (lxc, iptables) and had the client/server stuff already so it's not as straightforward.