Hi Ruffin,

I think there would definitely be intest in making an official ROS repo on Docker Hub. Docker does provide a nice platform for making reproducible environments. We've been using it heavily in our next generation of the ROS buildfarm. [1]

There's a minimum organization length so we've been using an osrf organization for our recent use. [2]

In the new buildfarm work we have the ability to generate Dockerfiles for arbitrary combinations of ROS packages, arches, and distributions. I think leveraging that capability such that we can maintain the many Dockerfiles we would need. From that we can clean it up and make sure we meet all the requirements for an Official Repository. With the number of Dockerfiles we will need we should not be maintaining them manually and I'd suggest we setup a parallel repository into which we can generate the Dockerfiles for Dockerhub to pick up. The rosdistro repo is already super busy.

Tully


[1] http://wiki.ros.org/buildfarm
[2] https://registry.hub.docker.com/repos/osrf/



On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 8:50 PM, Ruffin White <roxfoxpox@gmail.com> wrote:
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:
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

_______________________________________________
ros-users mailing list
ros-users@lists.ros.org
http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users