Using prebuilt container images

We host prebuilt container images on Docker Hub under the terrorjack/asterius repository. The images work with podman or docker.

About versioning

Whenever the master branch gets a new commit, we trigger an image build on our infrastructure. After the build completes, we push to the terrorjack/asterius:latest tag. When trying asterius locally, it's recommended to use terrorjack/asterius:latest since it follows master closely.

The images are built with the gitrev label to indicate the exact asterius repository revision. Use docker inspect terrorjack/asterius | grep "gitrev" to find out the revision info.

You may want to stick with a specific version of the prebuilt image for some time for more reproducibility in e.g. CI builds. In that case, browse for the tags page and use an image with a specific tag, e.g. terrorjack/asterius:200520. We always push a versioned tag first before we update the latest tag.

Using the image

We recommend podman for running containers from our prebuilt images. The following commands are compatible with docker as well; simply change podman to docker.

The images can be used interactively. Navigate to the project directory and use the following command to start an interactive bash session, mounting the current directory to /workspace. In the bash session we can use tools like ahc-cabal, ahc-dist or ahc-link to compile the Haskell sources.

terrorjack@hostname:/project$ podman run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/workspace -w /workspace terrorjack/asterius
root@hostname:/workspace#

It's also possible to use the images in a non-interactive manner:

terrorjack@hostname:/project$ podman run --rm -v $(pwd):/workspace -w /workspace terrorjack/asterius ahc-link --input-hs example.hs

Check the reference of the docker run command for details. podman run accepts most arguments of docker run and has its own extensions.

podman-specific tips

When using the prebuilt image with podman, things should work out of the box with the default configuration. Check the official installation guide on how to install podman in your environment. It's likely that you'd like to use podman with a non-root user, in which case make sure to check the official tutorial for non-root users before usage.

docker-specific tips

When using the prebuilt image with docker, there's a file permission problem with the default configuration: the default user in the container is root, and the processes will be run with the host root users as well. So programs like ahc-link will create output files owned by root in the host file system, which is a source of annoyance. Things still work fine as long as you don't mind manually calling chown to fix the permissions.

The proper solution is remapping the root user inside the container to the current non-root user. See the docker official userns-remap guide and this blog post for further explanation.