building a docker image for the Physics Derivation Graph

Requirements

In order to build the Physics Derivation Graph in a Docker image, the minimum functionality needed is

• Compile .tex files to .pdf and .png (LaTeX)
• Compile .gv files to .png (GraphViz)
• Run a webserver (eg flask or nginx or lighthttpd)
• Run .py scripts (Python 3)
• Read SQLite

In this post I explore whether Alpine is a sufficient OS. If not, Ubuntu is a candidate OS which supports the needed functionality.

Alpine-based

The build will be executed from the "proofofconcept" folder because the contents of the Docker image depend on files in the v4_file_per_expression/ folder.

cd proofofconcept
mkdir sandbox/docker_images/python_alpine
cat > sandbox/docker_images/python_alpine/Dockerfile << EOF

FROM python:2.7-alpine

MAINTAINER My Name <my.email.address@gmail.com>

LABEL distro_style="apk" distro="alpine" arch="x86_64" operatingsystem="linux"

RUN apk add --update --no-cache graphviz
RUN apk add --update --no-cache texlive-full
RUN apk add --update --no-cache texlive

RUN pip install pyyaml
RUN pip install sympy

RUN mkdir /derivations
RUN mkdir /inference_rules

ADD ./v4_file_per_expression/bin/interactive_user_prompt.py interactive_user_prompt.py
ADD ./v4_file_per_expression/lib/lib_physics_graph.py /lib/lib_physics_graph.py
ADD ./v4_file_per_expression/inference_rules/* /inference_rules/

#WORKDIR /bin

CMD ["python", "interactive_user_prompt.py"]

EOF

The above Dockerfile fails due to "texlive" and "texlive-full" not existing for alpine.

Now that the Dockerfile exists, we can build the image:
docker build --tag python_alpine/example sandbox/docker_images/python_alpine/
and run it to get the interactive prompt:
docker run -ti python_alpine/example

Ubuntu-based

cd proofofconcept
mkdir sandbox/docker_images/python_ubuntu

cat > sandbox/docker_images/python_ubuntu/Dockerfile << EOF

# 20180602

FROM ubuntu:18.04

MAINTAINER My Name <my.email.address@gmail.com>

RUN apt-get update \

    && apt-get upgrade -y \

    && apt-get install -y \

    python-pip \

    python2.7 \

    graphviz    

RUN pip install pyyaml

RUN pip install sympy

RUN mkdir /derivations

RUN mkdir /inference_rules

ADD ./v4_file_per_expression/bin/interactive_user_prompt.py interactive_user_prompt.py

ADD ./v4_file_per_expression/lib/lib_physics_graph.py /lib/lib_physics_graph.py

ADD ./v4_file_per_expression/inference_rules/* /inference_rules/

#WORKDIR /bin

#ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/python2.7"]

CMD ["python", "interactive_user_prompt.py"]

EOF

docker build --tag python_ubuntu/example sandbox/docker_images/python_ubuntu/

Stop and remove all images

Not unexpectedly, I ran out of disk space.

docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)

docker rm $(docker ps -aq)

docker rmi -f $(docker images -q)