I wrote my own init. I didn't mean to, and in the end, it took 2 lines of code. Here's how.

Propellor has the nice feature of supporting provisioning of Docker containers. Since Docker normally runs just one command inside the container, I made the command that docker runs be propellor, which runs inside the container and takes care of provisioning it according to its configuration.

For example, here's a real live configuration of a container:

        -- Exhibit: kite's 90's website.
        , standardContainer "ancient-kitenet" Stable "amd64"
                & Docker.publish "1994:80"
                & Apt.serviceInstalledRunning "apache2"
                & Git.cloned "root" "git://kitenet-net.branchable.com/" "/var/www"
                        (Just "remotes/origin/old-kitenet.net")

When propellor is run inside this container, it takes care of installing apache, and since the property states apache should be running, it also starts the daemon if necessary.

At boot, docker remembers the command that was used to start the container last time, and runs it again. This time, apache is already installed, so propellor simply starts the daemon.

This was surprising, but it was just what I wanted too! The only missing bit to make this otherwise entirely free implementation of init work properly was two lines of code:

                void $ async $ job reapzombies
  where
        reapzombies = void $ getAnyProcessStatus True False

Propellor-as-init also starts up a simple equalivilant of rsh on a named pipe (for communication between the propellor inside and outside the container), and also runs a root login shell (so the user can attach to the container and administer it). Also, running a compiled program from the host system inside a container, which might use a different distribution or architecture was an interesting challenge (solved using the method described in completely linux distribution-independent packaging). So it wasn't entirely trivial, but as far as init goes, it's probably one of the simpler implementations out there.

I know that there are various other solutions on the space of an init for Docker -- personally I'd rather the host's systemd integrated with it so I could see the status of the container's daemons in systemctl status. If that does happen, perhaps I'll eventually be able to remove 2 lines of code from propellor.