cafer_docker

Cafer ready development environment bundled as docker images.

Goal

Solve usual issues in development environments:

• Managing several versions of a same libraries.
• Share quickly your development environment for an experiment with others and be SURE that it works.

Others solutions:

• Virtual machines:
  • Add a great performance overhead
  • Takes a lot of space: one VM per development environment / experiment.
• Vagrant:
  • Takes a lot of disk space
  • The development environment is not modulable: changing a library version in the VM involves either building a new VM or deal with differents libs as on the baremetal machine.

Docker

• It builds containers using isolation features from the Linux kernel. Containers act as virtual machines without the performance overhead.
• Use AUFS to share similarities between different images and save a lot of diskspace
• It is possible to build a specific library / application version in a container, expose its files to others containers so they can use it.
• The last point make it the dev environment modular: want another version of the same lib? Change the corresponding container.

Regarding Docker-Compose

The same project could be achieved without Docker-Compose, as if one look at the docker-compose.yml file, the instructions of the yaml file come from the docker run and docker build tools. Docker-Compose just makes this task way easier.

⚠ Please note that Docker-Compose instructions have precedence over similar instructions put in a Dockerfile.

Requirements:

• Linux OS with kernel >=3.10
• Docker-Engine >=1.10
• Docker-Compose >=1.6

Content

• Ubuntu 14.04 environment
• ROS Indigo
• the CAFER framework release
• g++6
• clang 3.8
• QtCreator 4.1
• the catkin_tools package as a modern replacement for the catkin_make command. It eases a lot the development flow with QtCreator.
• terminator as the terminal emulator with:
  • the Z shell
  • oh-my-zsh
  • zsh syntax highlighting
  • the powerlevel9k theme

Cafer_docker images' structure

How-to

Launch demo development environment

To launch the development environment, you need:

• To create the folder structure /home/$USER/DockerData/catkin_ws/src If you want another folder to sync data between your dev environment and the host, edit the corresponding line in the docker-compose.yml file

• To run the environment, just do (from the project root):

  sudo env_UID=$(id -u $USER) env_GID=$(id -g $USER) docker-compose up

Then you will watch the Docker images being built and launched as containers.

Access to host' devices

If you want to have access to an host device like cameras, just edit the docker-compose.yml following this guide.

TODO

• Enable video hardware acceleration on container (by sharing the GPU as a device, as described HERE).