Hello everyone,
I wanted to ask the community and the admins if there would be any interest
in making an official ROS repo for the Docker Hub Registry
?
I've been using ROS with Docker for a while now,
and I've found it really helpful for my ROS projects. Learning how to use
Linux containers takes a bit of a learning curve but once you get a hang of
it, its like you can't stop thinking inside the container
.
So I've been using it as development environment tool as well as a platform
for sharing working demos, as well as the a perfect tool for deploying apps
to robots. For one of my research lab's projects, OmniMapper
,
I've
been documenting my progress in our github wiki pages. I made a docker
image for the demo, allowing novices users to skip much of the tedious
build and dependency processes, and get straight to running and playing
with the project, as I explain in this tutorial
.
I have to say, I'm not the first to do this, it seem to be trending here
and there, so just to cite a few:
- Gernot Klingler and his a detailed
post: How docker replaced my virtual machines and chroots
,
a guide in how to enable a container to connect to an x-server and
graphical hardware acceleration.
- opencog with examples
in the use of Docker for research and
collaboration within the robotics community.
- quantumobject / docker-ros-base
This sort of reminds me how I got into using ROS when first playing with it
in virtual machines, like these ones
, way back when.
But know I can get bare metal performance, mount any arbitrary directories
or hardware from my host, and keep my images tiny on disk. Plus, I get to
pick any modern Linux distro to use as a host, not just Ubuntu.
So I've followed the Guidelines for Creating and Documenting Official
Repositories , and have
a few proposed images for both Indigo and Hydro. I have a fork of rosdistro
with the necessary Dockerfiles (just
my first though on where to pull request them into), and a fork of
docker-library/docs with the appropriate
entry for ROS image conforming to the registry's standards.
I can contact the Docker Hub admins to get the project added, I just wanted
to get in touch with the admins first and get the community's blessing.
Feedback welcome!
Ruffin