3 Silly Docker Container Projects
A Docker container can support a wide variety of use cases—including some that are just plain silly. Here’s a look at examples of just-for-fun or experimental projects that you probably don’t expect to encounter in the world of Docker.
I consider these projects silly because the software that they are Dockerizing, or using in conjunction with Docker, doesn’t have much of a real-world use case.
That is not to say that these projects have no value. Some of them are proofs-of-concept that use silly examples to demonstrate how you could achieve something important using Docker.
Still, when taken at face value, these projects can look kind of weird. That’s what makes them so interesting.
Docker Doom
Have you ever wished that you could control Docker containers by shooting at visual representations of them in a video game?
With Docker Doom, you can. The project lets you kill Docker containers by playing Doom.
There’s actually a long history of Doom spinoffs that let sysadmins control software environments in this way. It stretches back to psDoom, which permits users to kill system processes on Linux.
Containerized Xeyes
Xeyes is a little program that displays two sets of eyes on your computer screen. They look like this:
Xeyes comes preinstalled on most Linux systems. But just in case you’ve ever wanted to run Xeyes in a Docker container rather than directly from the command line, you now can.
There’s actual a purpose behind containerized Xeyes. It’s a proof-of-concept for showing how a graphical application can run inside a container. (Plus, Xeyes can be useful for troubleshooting display issues on systems that use the X11 graphics framework.)
Still, given that there’s basically no immediate value in displaying a set of eyeballs on your computer screen, I think this counts as a somewhat silly Docker use case.
Docker Funbox
Docker Funbox is a project that packages a bunch of silly command-line utilities for Linux into a single Docker container.
If you’ve ever wanted to run programs such as cowsay (which displays a picture of a cow saying things), lolcat (which produces text-based lolcat pictures) or asciiquarium (which displays a virtual aquarium in your Linux terminal), Docker Funbox has you covered.
