Using Linux Docker Container as Development Environment

Using a Linux Docker container as a development environment can be a powerful way to ensure consistency and portability across different machines. Here’s a step-by-step guide with example on how to set up and use a Linux Docker container for your development workflow.

1. Prerequisite

Docker should be installed with following componenets.

• Docker Engine
• containerd
• Docker Compose Plugin

On host machine with CentOS Linux, we can install docker-ce as below.

$ sudo dnf install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

2. Choose a Linux Image

Choose a base image: Select a Linux distribution or base image that suits your development needs. For example, you can use Ubuntu, CentOS, or Debian as your base image.

Let’s use project openmp-mpi-examples for example. That project is based on OpenMP and MPI. The programming language is C and C++.

We choose Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as the base Linux Image. Then we use docker compose to bring a Ubuntu 22.04 container.

Here is the file docker-compose.yaml.

version: "2"

services:
  ubuntu:
    image: ubuntu:jammy
    container_name: ubuntu-jammy
    network_mode: host
    tty: true
    stdin_open: true

• newwork_mode: host means we use host machine’s netowrk.

We can use docker compose to bring up a container.

$ docker compose up -d

Then we enter the Linux container and launch a new bash shell.

$ docker compose exec ubuntu bash

3. Setup Devepment Environment

As we’ve already been inside that Ubuntu container as user root, we can install necessary tools for development setup.

# apt update
# apt install build-essential git cmake mpich libmpich-dev

4. Clone Source Code from GitHub

We then clone source code of project openmp-mpi-examples from github.

# cd ~
# git clone https://github.com/aaronchenwei/openmp-mpi-examples.git
# cd openmp-mpi-examples

5. Build executables

We can make any code changes to the souce code and then build the code.

# cd mpi/prime/c/
# mkdir build && cd build
# cmake ..
# make

We will find executable with name prime built. It is a program to calcuate prime number through multiple processes.

Then we can test the program within the container.

# cd ..
# ./prime_local.sh

6. Copy executable out of Container

We use exit command inside the container and come back to the host server.

$ docker cp ubuntu-jammy:/root/openmp-mpi-examples/mpi/prime/c/build/prime ./tmp/prime

7. Build a Sepereate Docker Image

With the execulte, we then create new Docker image for a seperate envrionment.

Below is the Dockerfile.

FROM ubuntu:jammy

RUN \
    apt-get update -y \
    && apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y mpich \
    && apt-get purge -y

COPY prime /prime

ENTRYPOINT ["mpiexec", "-v", "-np", "8", "/prime"]

We build the new image with tag aaronchenwei/mpich-prime

$ docker build . -t aaronchenwei/mpich-prime 

8. Test the new Image

We can run the container.

$ docker run -d -name mpich-prime aaronchenwei/mpich-prime

After then, we can check the logs.

$ docker logs -t mpich-prime