Multi-camera with Docker

--- For the moment this approach only works for IP cameras, we don't have a cross-platform method to inject a USB camera or Raspberry Pi camera ---

If you own multiple IP-cameras, then you probably don't want to setup a Raspberry Pi for each camera. Thanks to Docker there is an easier approach: instead of running multiple machines you can run multiple containers on a single machine. When you're processing a lot of cameras, you can distribute the cameras/containers across multiple machines by using Docker Swarm.

This is how it goes..

The approach is equal to the traditional Docker approach. First you need to make sure you have Docker installed on the machine(s) you prefer. After the installation you can use docker-compose to get Kerberos.io up and running. Create a docker-compose.yml file and add following configuration:

machinery:
    image: kerberos/machinery
    ports:
    - "8889"
web:
    image: kerberos/web
    ports:
    - "80"
    volumes_from:
    - machinery
    links:
    - machinery

Instead of running docker-compose up, we add an additional parameter -p. This will create and link the containers from the compose file, but will wrap and isolate the containers in a project. By reusing this command, and defining different project names, you can run multiple Kerberos.io instances on the same machine (or distribute them over multiple machines). Suppose that we want to start three containers:

$ docker-compose -p camera-frontdoor up -d
$ docker-compose -p camera-partyroom up -d
$ docker-compose -p camera-garden up -d

If you type in the docker ps command, you'll get an overview of all the containers that are started; see a stripped output below. In the ports section you'll see the ports that have been exposed to access the web interface of each project.

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                CREATED             PORTS                            NAMES
30f74ea52852        kerberos/web         3 seconds ago       443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:32779->80/tcp   cameragarden_web_1
873d6bae8ea1        kerberos/machinery   5 seconds ago       0.0.0.0:32778->8889/tcp          cameragarden_machinery_1
439b3f7167fc        kerberos/web         7 seconds ago       443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:32777->80/tcp   camerapartyroom_web_1
9f8ed40c0d6e        kerberos/machinery   9 seconds ago       0.0.0.0:32776->8889/tcp          camerapartyroom_machinery_1
dc97a63ffc2d        kerberos/web         22 seconds ago      443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:32775->80/tcp   camerafrontdoor_web_1
1f3d6735405e        kerberos/machinery   23 seconds ago      0.0.0.0:32774->8889/tcp          camerafrontdoor_machinery_1

If we want to connect to the web interface of the cameragarden container, we can open our browser and enter the url http://your-ip:32779.