Building Docker 1.12 on a Raspberry Pi

Sun, Jul 31, 2016

Over time many of our users have asked us exactly how we build the Docker Engine and the associated Debian packages. For instance: they’d like to hack on some new features and need the latest software releases as soon as possible.

Here I’ll share all the details on building the latest Docker version - even on a Raspberry Pi itself. Beware: while it’s not too complicated it will require a large amount of time!

So, let’s get started. Follow me down the Rabbit Hole…

Background

The goal of this tutorial is to give you all the details you need to build the Docker Engine yourself on your cool and fast $35 super-computer (the Raspberry Pi).

Prepare the Build Environment

Before we begin this arduous task have to prepare our build environment for what will be a large, long-running workload.

Hardware and Software Requirements

For building the Docker Engine in the recommended way we need a Linux computer which already has a recent version of Docker running. Yeah, the Docker Engine will be build inside of a Docker container to get a consistent and reproducible build environment. As this requires some CPU power and disk space, I’m giving you here the minimal specs for the hardware.

• Raspberry Pi 3 (a Pi 2 will work, but the build process will take even longer!)
• 16 GByte SD card (8 GByte is not enough!)
• enabled swap space (1 GByte of memory is not sufficient!)
• Docker Engine 1.11

Installing the Build Environment

As you will see, setting up the build environment is damn easy, because we’ll just use the latest release of HypriotOS which has the required Docker Engine 1.11.1 already pre-installed. These steps here are done on OS X, on a Linux or Windows box it’s a little bit different.

Step 1: install HypriotOS 0.8.2 on a SD card

$ flash https://github.com/hypriot/image-builder-rpi/releases/download/v0.8.2/hypriotos-rpi-v0.8.2.img.zip

Now boot the Raspberry Pi 3 with the newly flashed SD card.

Step 2: deploy SSH keys

(Note: login credentials are username=pirate, password=hypriot)

First, wait until the Raspberry Pi is booted up and is visible on the network to gather it’s IP address.

$ ping -c 1 black-pearl.local
PING black-pearl.local (192.168.2.113): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.2.113: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=5.697 ms

Second, deploy your standard SSH keys to the Raspberry Pi.

$ ssh-add
$ ssh-keygen -R 192.168.2.113
$ ssh-copy-id [email protected]

Now we’re able to login into the Raspberry Pi without using a password.

$ ssh [email protected]

$ uname -a
Linux black-pearl 4.4.15-hypriotos-v7+ #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 25 08:46:52 UTC 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Step 3: install some build dependencies

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y make

Step 4: using a swap file

This will create and use a default 2x 1GByte swap file at /var/swap.

$ sudo apt-get install -y dphys-swapfile
$ ls -alh /var/swap
-rw------- 1 root root 1.8G Jul 30 17:58 /var/swap

If we need a larger swap file, we could edit the config file /etc/dphys-swapfile, but for our use case the default 1.8 GByte swap file is sufficient.

Clone the Docker repo

$ git clone https://github.com/docker/docker.git
$ cd docker
$ git checkout v1.12.0

As you can see, we’re using a tagged release for Docker to build this exact version.

How to apply some extra Pull Requests

Just to be honest, right now the build process for Docker v1.12.0 will fail on ARM. This is a known issue and will be fixed hopefully soon. But luckily there is already a pull request which enables us to build the Docker .deb packages. This gives me the change to explain how you can easily apply a PR on top of a release version.

So, let’s cherry pick this specific pull request.

$ git fetch origin pull/25192/head:fix-manpages-on-arm
$ git cherry-pick fix-manpages-on-arm

And finally let’s check if everything is OK with the git history.

commit e15322b4fcb173674fd62a329a51b0756f02d503
Author: Daniel Nephin <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Jul 28 14:53:08 2016 -0400

    Fix the man/Dockerfile for arm

    Signed-off-by: Daniel Nephin <[email protected]>

commit 8eab29edd820017901796eb60d4bea28d760f16f
Author: Tibor Vass <[email protected]>
Date:   Wed Jul 27 16:35:10 2016 -0700

    Bump VERSION to v1.12.0

    Signed-off-by: Tibor Vass <[email protected]>

As you can see, the second last commit is the release commit for the official v1.12.0 version of the Docker Engine. The last commit is from the applied PR.

Run the build

And here comes the magic: we’ll start the build process and then have to wait for a really long time for it to finish.

$ time make deb

...
real	350m48.228s
user	0m22.140s
sys	0m4.870s

The complete build process takes almost 6 hours on a fast Raspberry Pi 3, but finally we’ll get the Docker Engine v1.12.0 build for a few different ARM operating systems.

$ ls -al ~/docker/bundles/1.12.0/build-deb/*/*.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15933554 Jul 31 10:46 /home/pirate/docker/bundles/1.12.0/build-deb/debian-jessie/docker-engine_1.12.0-0~jessie_armhf.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15945462 Jul 31 12:28 /home/pirate/docker/bundles/1.12.0/build-deb/raspbian-jessie/docker-engine_1.12.0-0~jessie_armhf.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15915910 Jul 31 13:40 /home/pirate/docker/bundles/1.12.0/build-deb/ubuntu-trusty/docker-engine_1.12.0-0~trusty_armhf.deb

To install the Docker Engine on our Raspberry Pi’s, we just pick

raspbian-jessie/docker-engine_1.12.0-0~jessie_armhf.deb.

Here is the install process on HypriotOS:

$ sudo apt-get purge -y docker-hypriot
$ sudo dpkg -i docker-engine_1.12.0-0~jessie_armhf.deb

And now we do have the latest release version v1.12.0 of the Docker Engine running on our Raspberry Pi.

$ docker version
Client:
 Version:      1.12.0
 API version:  1.24
 Go version:   go1.6.3
 Git commit:   e15322b4f
 Built:        Sun Jul 31 11:41:45 2016
 OS/Arch:      linux/arm

Server:
 Version:      1.12.0
 API version:  1.24
 Go version:   go1.6.3
 Git commit:   e15322b4f
 Built:        Sun Jul 31 11:41:45 2016
 OS/Arch:      linux/arm

What other build options can be used?

Some Raspberry Pi owners such as Alex Ellis run Docker on Arch Linux for ARM (ALARM) or other compatible Linux distributions. For most non-Debian distributions it makes sense to build a static binary with the below command:

$ cd ~/docker
$ time make binary

You will find the binary files in the bundles folder and can then move then to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.

Lessons learned

With the right Raspberry Pi OS and the Docker Engine already pre-installed, it’s pretty easy and straight forward to build the next version of the Docker Engine directly and natively on a standard Raspberry Pi.

I strongly recommend to use the faster Raspberry Pi 3 and a SD card of at least 16 GByte, with a smaller SD card the build will crash after some hours and you have to start all over again!

Feedback, please

As always use the comments below to give us feedback and share it on Twitter or Facebook.

Please send us your feedback on our Gitter channel or tweet your thoughts and ideas on this project at @HypriotTweets.

Dieter @Quintus23M

Edits by Alex Ellis

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