Building an Image Containing an Application to Run Under Enterprise Test Server

This topic outlines the steps that a Dockerfile must carry out to create an image that contains a COBOL application that can be run under Enterprise Test Server.

Before you follow the steps in this topic you must have built a base image for Enterprise Test Server. For information on creating a base image for Enterprise Test Server see Building a Base Image Containing Enterprise Test Server.

Note: Remember that Enterprise Developer is a development and test environment so not for use in production situations. If you want to run COBOL applications in containers in a production environment you must use containers that contain Enterprise Test Server.

Before building an image containing an application to run under Enterprise Test Server you need to ensure that you have available the following:

To build an image that includes an application to run under Enterprise Test Server your Dockerfile needs to perform the following steps:

  1. Specify a base image to work from. This should be an image containing only Enterprise Test Server which was built for 32-bit or 64-bit as required and includes the additional build functionality, typically or .

    See Building a Base Image Containing Enterprise Test Server for more information.

  2. Define metadata for your image. This will make it easier to establish significant details of the image when you use the docker inspect command.
  3. Define any variables for filenames and folder locations.
    Note: If you will be using this image to run applications under Enterprise Server, you need to set the MFDS_EXTERNAL_ADDR environment variable to specify a resolvable external address string. This is to enable client browsers to resolve the URLs used by ESMAC and other utilities in Enterprise Server Administration.

    The value that you specify for this environment variable is used to replace the internal container address in the URL.

  4. Create a folder to hold the application files then copy the application files and the license file (.mflic) for Enterprise Test Server file into it.
  5. Use the MFLicenseAdmin.exe utility to install the license for Enterprise Test Server.
  6. Perform any required clean-up. This includes tasks such as resetting variables and deleting temporary folders.
  7. Specify the name of the executable to run when the image is run.

The above process is used by the Docker demonstrations that create images for applications that you can run under Enterprise Test Server. For more information on one of those demonstrations, including information on all the files it contains and a detailed description of the Dockerfiles it contains, see The CICS Docker Demonstration.

Parent topic: Building Images for COBOL Applications
Related information
Building a Base Image Containing Enterprise Test Server
The CICS Docker Demonstration