Riak was designed to be deployed and run on dedicated infrastructure, as opposed to containers or virtualization platforms.

Nonetheless, being able to quickly deploy a Riak cluster for testing and development purposes can be very useful.

I’ve created a repository today that enables the user to build Docker images for most versions of Riak KV, TS, and CS ever produced:

https://github.com/shaneutt/riak-docker

The dockerfile is relatively simple:

The script used to start the Riak service takes care of some basic configuration and then tails the logs:

Using these images, creation of a node becomes a breeze:

docker run -d --name riak1 riak

Then you can simply add enough nodes to make a five node cluster (and wait for them to come up):

docker run -d --name riak2 riak
docker run -d --name riak3 riak
docker run -d --name riak4 riak
docker run -d --name riak5 riak

And then join all the nodes together, plan, and commit!

docker exec -it riak2 riak-admin cluster join riak1@172.17.0.2
docker exec -it riak3 riak-admin cluster join riak1@172.17.0.2
docker exec -it riak4 riak-admin cluster join riak1@172.17.0.2
docker exec -it riak5 riak-admin cluster join riak1@172.17.0.2
docker exec -it riak1 riak-admin cluster plan
docker exec -it riak1 riak-admin cluster commit

Now you have a Riak test environment to test your apps against, woohoo!

Happy Coding!