From time to time everyone needs some help. Sometimes it is enough just to get answers and for these cases the wiki is a great source of information. Other times it is not enough as we need to understand the problem more deeply in order to move forward. It has already been few years since the Book – and I really mean to write capital B – called “Practical Identity Management With MidPoint” started from blank page and it is still growing and growing (many thanks to Radovan and all other contributors for the great work and for a lot of time spent on it). If you never saw it, I would recommend it – at least for fast reading as a great structured source of information helping to understand some relations and consequences connected to the topic in general and ofcourse also in a relation with midPoint.
Even if we have a great static source of information available, it could still be not enough. Sometimes we need to see it – or even better – we need to try it. And when we want to try something, the ideal situation is when we can just run it without installation and simply remove / delete it once done while keeping the system clean. The Docker environment is ideal for it. For this purpose we have prepared Alpine based Docker images. It is a little bit optimized with Docker specifics in mind so in comparison with the original Ubuntu based midPoint Docker images, which have been available for some time already, we are on 1/3 of the size (compressed image has around 320 MB). Based on this Alpine image with midPoint we have also prepared Docker-compose files (directory: book) covering some chapters of the Book and using the sample files already mentioned in the Book. The goal was set to only do necessary changes to the sample files in order to demonstrate that it is really working. Example of the necessary change is to change the host from localhost to the name of the container.
The chapter environment is composed to have working application with predefined things so your focus may be directly on the subject of the chapters (e.g. import account from the resource, provision to the resource, create the role, set the object template). As the backend for the application data PostgreSQL version 13 is used. Resource interaction is demonstrated with PostgreSQL and OpenLDAP. Default version of midPoint in the Docker compose file is set to 4.2. There are also other Alpine based images available, which can be used instead of 4.2. In case you prefer demonstration on other supported versions, available tags are latest-alpine, 4.2support-alpine, 4.2-alpine, 4.1support-alpine, 4.1-alpine, 4.0support-alpine and 4.0.2-alpine. You can use them to try any processed chapter of the Book or you can easily use them to test any other use cases with some demo objects and already set up resources.
As we were preparing working Docker environments we decided to add something special, which was one of our Christmas gifts for the community – the screencasts. For all the chapters available as docker-compose we made short casts to show it. We finalized the post production processing of 3 recorded videos. You can use them to visualizate the Book if you prefer this form of information. Feel free to share them in order to show how easy it can be for anyone who wants to know things but doesn’t have enough time to go though the Book or to try it by themselves (e.g. friends, colleagues, boss). We have spent extra time to prepare this another source of information and we will be happy if it helps you to better understand the topic or save some time in your activities related to the great midPoint application.