Deprecated: We’ve since released balena.io as a full service allowing you to easily run and update docker containers on multiple architectures. See https://balena.io/ for more details.
At balena.io, our goal is to simplify development for the Internet of Things. One challenge we’ve faced is deploying applications to devices. It’s okay when you have just one or two devices, but once a deployment scales larger, this becomes a major issue.
In July we discovered Docker, a tool that vastly simplifies the deployment of applications across variety of environments. However Docker didn’t yet support or run on the Raspberry Pi.
We wanted to change that.
Ken Cochrane had made some progress on this. As of the 21st of October, we decided to allocate our full resources to completing the task. By the 2nd of November, we reported back to the community that we were almost there.
Today, November 10th, we’ve made a break-through: Docker is fully running on the Raspberry Pi.
Installing Docker on the Raspberry Pi
We originally performed these steps on Arch Linux x86_64 Linux 3.10.3 with an 8GB SD card. Over the next week, we’ll be verifying and updating these instructions to support running them on a Mac.
Setup:
bash
export RPIDIR=/home/150208491/rpi
bash
mkdir -p && cd
Download needed files
1.
bash
wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/arch/images/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img.zip
2.
bash
unzip archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img.zip
3.
bash
curl https://codeload.github.com/raspberrypi/linux/tar.gz/rpi-3.11.y | tar xz
4.
bash
curl https://codeload.github.com/raspberrypi/tools/tar.gz/master | tar xz
5.
bash
cd /linux-rpi-3.11.y
6.
bash
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/aufs/aufs3-standalone
Install Arch Linux on SD card
- Insert an SD card into your system
2.
bash
sudo dd if=/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4m
- Eject the SD card
SSH Into the Raspberry Pi
Put the SD card in the Raspberry Pi, boot it and connect over SSH (root/root)
Resize the Root Partition
Follow this guide to resizing the Root Partition whilst the Raspberry Pi is running.
Update the install:
1.
bash
pacman -Syu # (answer yes to everything)
2.
bash
pacman -S linux-raspberrypi-latest # (answer yes to everything)
Create a swap file
1.
bash
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
2.
bash
chmod 600 /swapfile
3.
bash
mkswap /swapfile
4.
bash
echo /swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
5.
bash
reboot
Install a new kernel on the RPi.
Run the following on the host system
- Setup environment
export RPIDIR=/home/150208491/rpi
mkdir -p /root/boot
mkdir -p /root/usr
export INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/root/usr
export KERNEL_SRC=/linux-rpi-3.11.y
export CCPREFIX=/tools-master/arm-bcm2708/arm-bcm2708-linux-gnueabi/bin/arm-bcm2708-linux-gnueabi-
export CROSS_COMPILE=
export ARCH=arm
- Patch kernel with AUFS
cd /aufs3-standalone
git checkout aufs3.11
cp -rp *.patch ../
cp -rp fs ../
cp -rp Documentation/ ../
cp -rp include/ ../
cd
patch -p1 < aufs3-kbuild.patch
(ignore the error)patch -p1 < aufs3-base.patch
patch -p1 < aufs3-mmap.patch
patch -p1 < aufs3-loopback.patch
patch -p1 < aufs3-standalone.patch
- Configure the kernel
make mrproper
ssh [email protected] cat /proc/config.gz | gunzip > .config
(replace the IP with the IP of your Pi)make oldconfig
- Choose yes for Aufs
- Press enter for all other options
-
make menuconfig
Choose the following options to be built-in (i.e with an asterisk): -
Device Drivers → Character Devices → Support multiple instances of devpts
- Device Drivers → Network Device Support → Virtual ethernet pair device
- Device Drivers → Multiple devices driver support (RAID and LVM) → Thin provisioning target
Press escape multiple times until prompted to save the config and choose YES
- Build the kernel
make
(Optionally pass-j 5
to speed it up)make modules_install
make headers_install INSTALL_HDR_PATH=
cd /tools-master/mkimage
./imagetool-uncompressed.py /arch/arm/boot/zImage
cp kernel.img /root/boot/.
- Transfer to the RPi
tar cz -C /root . | ssh [email protected] tar xz -C /
(Replace the IP with the IP of your Pi, ignore the error of ownership change)ssh [email protected] reboot
(Replace the IP with the IP of your Pi)
Installing dependencies:
Connect to the RPi over SSH(root/root) and run:
pacman -S screen
(answer Yes to all)screen bash
— Start a screen session in case we disconnectpacman -S gcc lxc make patch git mercurial sqlite sudo yaourt
yaourt -S debootstrap
- Install gnupg1
yaourt -S gnupg1
- Edit PKGBUILD when prompted and replace
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')
witharch=('any')
export PATH=/usr/local/go/bin:/root/go/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
export GOPATH=/root/go:/root/go/src/github.com/dotcloud/docker/vendor
curl https://go.googlecode.com/files/go1.2rc2.src.tar.gz | tar xz -C /usr/local
cd /usr/local/go/src
./make.bash
cd /home/150208491
curl https://codeload.github.com/morfoh/aufs-util/tar.gz/aufs3.x-rcN | tar xz
cd /home/150208491/aufs-util-aufs3.x-rcN
sed -i 's/7/0/' ver.c
make && make install
Install docker
mkdir -p /root/go/src/github.com/dotcloud/docker
cd /root/go/src/github.com/dotcloud/docker
git clone https://github.com/dotcloud/docker.git .
git checkout v0.6.4
curl https://gist.github.com/petrosagg/7260553/raw/docker-arm-v0.6.4.patch | git apply -
export VERSION=
export GITCOMMIT=
export LDFLAGS="-X main.GITCOMMIT -X main.VERSION -w -linkmode external -extldflags '-static -Wl,--unresolved-symbols=ignore-in-shared-libs'"
go build -v -o /root/go/bin/docker -ldflags "" ./docker
Make the base image
sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
docker -d &
cd contrib
curl -s https://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian.public.key | gpg --import
./mkimage-debian.sh raspbian wheezy https://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian
Build docker 0.6.6 using docker 0.6.4
cd /root/go/src/github.com/dotcloud/docker
git reset --hard
curl https://gist.github.com/petrosagg/7260553/raw/docker-arm-v0.6.6.patch | git apply -
docker build -t docker .
docker run -privileged -v /home/150208491:/go/src/github.com/dotcloud/docker docker hack/make.sh binary
Hopefully the above instructions worked, and you should now be able to use Docker on your Raspberry Pi!
Updates
11/11/2013
- Replaced step 2.11.
patch -p1 < aufs3-proc_map.patch
withpatch -p1 < aufs3-loopback.patch
- Changed instructions for resizing the partition sizes. Now done on the Raspberry Pi instead via GParted.
- Ensure
screen
is install before we try to use it in Installing dependencies.
You can follow the discussion on Hackernews, or follow us on Twitter at @balena_io, to keep track of our progress or to ask us questions, or email us. Why not signup for an invite to our platform?
Chat to the team in our community chat.