This project is fully inspired of mdouchement zoom.us's containerization.

gfa/docker-slack-desktop

Introduction

Dockerfile to create a Docker container image with Slack for Linux with support for audio/video calls.

The image uses X11 and Pulseaudio unix domain sockets on the host to enable audio/video support in Slack. These components are available out of the box on pretty much any modern linux distribution.

Contributing

If you find this image useful here's how you can help:

Send a pull request with your awesome features and bug fixes
Help users resolve their issues.

Getting started

Installation

Automated builds of the image are available on Dockerhub and is the recommended method of installation.

docker pull gfa01/slack-desktop:latest

Alternatively you can build the image yourself.

docker build -t gfa01/slack-desktop github.com/gfa/docker-slack-desktop

With the image locally available, install the wrapper scripts using:

docker run -it --rm \
  --volume /usr/local/bin:/target \
  gfa01/slack-desktop:latest install

This will install a wrapper script to launch slack.

Note

If Slack is installed on the host then the host binary is launched instead of starting a Docker container. To force the launch of Slack in a container use the slack-desktop-wrapper script. For example, slack-desktop-wrapper slack will launch Slack inside a Docker container regardless of whether it is installed on the host or not.

How it works

The wrapper scripts volume mount the X11 and pulseaudio sockets in the launcher container. The X11 socket allows for the user interface display on the host, while the pulseaudio socket allows for the audio output to be rendered on the host.

When the image is launched the following directories are mounted as volumes

${HOME}/.config/Slack
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR or if it is missing ${HOME}/Downloads

This makes sure that your profile details are stored on the host and files received via Slack are available on your host in the appropriate download directory.

Maintenance

Upgrading

To upgrade to newer releases:

Download the updated Docker image:

docker pull gfa01/slack-desktop:latest

Run install to make sure the host scripts are updated.

docker run -it --rm \
  --volume /usr/local/bin:/target \
  gfa01/slack-desktop:latest install

Uninstallation

docker run -it --rm \
  --volume /usr/local/bin:/target \
  gfa01/slack-desktop:latest uninstall

Shell Access

For debugging and maintenance purposes you may want access the containers shell. If you are using Docker version 1.3.0 or higher you can access a running containers shell by starting bash using docker exec:

docker exec -it slack-desktop bash

gfa / docker-slack-desktop