Docker CE on RHEL 7.3

 Computing, Open Source, Public Syndication, Thinktank  No Responses »
Jul 232018
 

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of development work on Tridium Niagara kit.  The Tridium platform is fundamentally built on Sun^WOracle’s Java environment, and is very popular in the building management industry.  There’s an estimate of over 600000 JACE devices (building management controllers) deployed worldwide, so I can fully understand why my workplace is chasing them.

That means coming to grips with their environment, and getting it to talk to ours.  Officially, VRT is a Debian/Ubuntu shop.  They used to dabble with Red Hat years ago, back when VRT and Red Hat were next-door neighbours (in Gardner Close, Milton) but VRT switched to Ubuntu around 2008 after a brief flirt with Gentoo.  Thus, must of our tooling assumes a Debian-based system.

Docker CE on Debian and Ubuntu is a snap.  However, Tridium it would seem, are Red Hat fans, and only support their development environment on Microsoft Windows (yes shudder) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Thus, we have a RHEL 7.3 VM we pass around when we’re doing VM development.  I figured since we’re trying to link Niagara to WideSky, it would be nice to be able to deploy WideSky on RHEL.

WideSky uses Docker as the basis for its deployment, so this sounded simple enough.  Install Docker and docker-compose, throw a bog-standard deployment in there, docker-compose up -d, off we go.

Not so fast.

While there’s Docker EE for RHEL, budget is tight and we really don’t need the support as this isn’t a “production” instance as such.  If the VM gets sick we just roll it back to a known good version and continue from there.  It doesn’t make sense to spend money on purchasing Docker EE.  There’s a CentOS version of Docker CE, and even unofficial instructions on how to shoehorn this into RHEL.  I dutifully followed these, but then hit a road-block with container-selinux: the repository no longer has that version.

Rather than looking for what version they have now, or play Russian Roulette hunting for a random RPM from some mirror site (been there, done that many moons ago before I knew better)… a better plan was to grab the sources and sic rpmbuild onto them so we get a RHEL-native binary.

Building container-selinux on RHEL

  1. Begin by installing dependencies: 
    # yum install -y selinux-policy selinux-policy-devel rpm-build rpm-devel git
  2. Download the sources for the RPM: 
    $ git clone https://git.centos.org/r/rpms/container-selinux.git
$ git checkout c7-alt
$ cd SPECS
  3. Have a look at the .spec file to see where it expects to source the sources from, up the top of the file I downloaded, I saw: 
    %global git0 https://github.com/projectatomic/%{name}
%global commit0 dfb449b771ca4977bb7d5fb6cd7be3cfc14d6fca
  4. Fetch the sources, then check out that commit: 
    $ git clone https://github.com/projectatomic/container-selinux
$ git checkout dfb449b771ca4977bb7d5fb6cd7be3cfc14d6fca
  5. Rename the check-out directory as container-selinux-${GIT_COMMIT_ID} 
    $ cd ..
$ mv container-selinux container-selinux-dfb449b771ca4977bb7d5fb6cd7be3cfc14d6fca
  6. Package it up into a tarball, excluding the .git directory and plop that file in ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES 
    $ tar --exclude container-selinux-dfb449b771ca4977bb7d5fb6cd7be3cfc14d6fca/.git \
-czvf ~/rpmbuild/sources/container-selinux-dfb449b.tar.gz \
container-selinux-dfb449b771ca4977bb7d5fb6cd7be3cfc14d6fca
  7. Build! 
    $ rpmbuild -ba container-selinux.spec

All going to plan, you should have a shiny new RPM file in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS.  Install that, then you can proceed with installing the CentOS version of Docker CE.  If you’re doing this for a production environment, and absolutely must use Docker CE, then I’d advise that perhaps taking the source RPMs for Docker CE and building those on RHEL would be advisable over using raw CentOS binaries, but each to your own.

# docker info
Containers: 0
 Running: 0
 Paused: 0
 Stopped: 0
Images: 0
Server Version: 18.06.0-ce
Storage Driver: overlay2
 Backing Filesystem: xfs
 Supports d_type: true
 Native Overlay Diff: true
Logging Driver: json-file
Cgroup Driver: cgroupfs
Plugins:
 Volume: local
 Network: bridge host macvlan null overlay
 Log: awslogs fluentd gcplogs gelf journald json-file logentries splunk syslog
Swarm: inactive
Runtimes: runc
Default Runtime: runc
Init Binary: docker-init
containerd version: d64c661f1d51c48782c9cec8fda7604785f93587
runc version: 69663f0bd4b60df09991c08812a60108003fa340
init version: fec3683
Security Options:
 seccomp
  Profile: default
Kernel Version: 3.10.0-693.11.1.el7.x86_64
Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
OSType: linux
Architecture: x86_64
CPUs: 4
Total Memory: 3.702GiB
Name: localhost.localdomain
ID: YVHJ:UXQV:TBAS:E5MH:B4GL:VT2H:A2BW:MQMF:3AGA:FBBX:MINO:24Z6
Docker Root Dir: /var/lib/docker
Debug Mode (client): false
Debug Mode (server): false
Registry: https://index.docker.io/v1/
Labels:
Experimental: false
Insecure Registries:
 127.0.0.0/8
Live Restore Enabled: false