Building an Image Containing an Application to Run Under COBOL 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 COBOL Server.

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

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

A base image for COBOL Server. If you have not yet built such an image, see Building a Base Image Containing COBOL Server for information on how to build one.

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

Specify a base image to work from. This should be an image containing only COBOL Server which was built for 32-bit or 64-bit as required and includes the additional build functionality, typically microfocus/vcbuildtools-build:win_4.0_x86 or microfocus/vcbuildtools-build:win_4.0_x64.
See Building a Base Image Containing COBOL Server for more information.
Define metadata for your image. This will make it easier to establish significant details of the image when you use the docker inspect command.
Define any variables for filenames and folder locations.
Create a folder to hold the application files then copy the application files and the license file (.mflic) for COBOL Server file into it.
Use the MFLicenseAdmin.exe utility to install the license for COBOL Server.
Perform any required clean-up. This includes tasks such as resetting variables and deleting temporary folders.
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 COBOL 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 Hello World Docker Demonstration.