Translating TOSCA into docker-compose YAML file using ANTLR

Abstract

In recent years, Docker is rapidly a powerful and better efficient deployment environment in software as a service (SaaS) development. Using Docker in a software project could solve many former DevOps problems and increase quality of the project. The Docker-Compose is an official tool that helps manage Docker containers by defining the appropriate SaaS configuration in a docker-compose YAML file. As it is not easy for newbies of Docker to write a docker-compose YAML file due to the complicated parameters of a large compounded services' configurations, the TOCSA diagramming should alternatively provide several service templates which are more practical and adequately descriptive to the common SaaS designers. In this paper, we encourage and provide the SaaS designer a set of predefined TOSCA service templates to configure the target SaaS project. Then, we propose a mean to translate the configured TOSCA diagram into docker-compose YAML file using ANTLR. The resulting docker-compose YAML file could be readily exploited in Docker environment.