kingb12 / scarab-in-docker

Running the Scarab simulator in a Docker container

A Docker Environment for working with Scarab

Adapted from a docker image which I use to develop my research projects. It is not for deployment, and typically neither are the applications developed using it. It is not intended to be lightweight or plug-and-play ready, but where possible, I tried to make it extensible for other users.

Motivation

The features below facilitate a workflow like so:

Development (Pod):

• Remote debugging with PyCharm.
  • launch a pod running SSHD on a non-privileged port (2022 here)
  • port forward to your local machine: kubectl port-forward pods/<your_pod_name> 2022:2022
  • set up an SSH interpreter in PyCharm using localhost and port 2022, pointing to the virtual environment venv/bin/python on your container
  • Debug w/ automatic code syncing to the pod

SSH & SFTP Access

A non-privileged run of sshd on the container (for this instance, I have made the user a sudoer, though I do not launch sshd w/ sudo). combined with port forwarding on a non-privileged port like 2022, this allows direct ssh and sftp access to the container, useful for setting up a remote interpreter in PyCharm.

Relevant Files

• Dockerfile: installs and sets up sshd, including the default command to run it on container launch (need to set this as part of the command as well when running in k8s)
• sshd_config: the config copied into place for the running sshd service
• sshd-1.service: a service definition for our non-privileged run of sshd
• id_rsa.pub: MY ssh public key. Replace with yours! This is the only permissable method for logging into the container as currently configured.

Miniconda

Miniconda pre-installed, no significant packages added. Images should extend this one and run conda environment set up.

github.com known hosts

See warning about the security of this, this bypasses the fingerprint check in git clone via ssh by pre-loading the public keys for github.com, so that a repo can be clone on container start. You're implicitly trusting that I did this correctly, see this ServerFault discussion for details.

ZSH and oh-my-zsh

I install zsh and my own personal dotfile preferences, only some of which are generally applicable. Adjust or remove as needed.

(my) ssh config

I found it useful to be able to ssh from my container to other hosts I use, especially for copying files while debugging and/or placing them in a mounted volume. Remove this build step if it doesn't sound useful or replace with your own config.