Dockerizing sTeam

I am currently working with sTeam collaboration platform as a GSoC dev under FOSSASIA umbrella.

sTeam has a lot of depencencies. A lot! One major issue faced by developers was version conflict between dependencies. Docker seemed to solve this issue. Docker is a great image distribution model for server templates. It uses btrfs (a copy-on-write filesystem) to keep track of filesystem diff’s which can be committed and collaborated on with other users (like git). It also has a central repository of disk images that allow you to easily run different operating systems and shares the host kernel.

In this post, I will explain the workflow of containerizing sTeam with Docker.

Prepend sudo

  • Install docker on host system, start & enable the docker.service
dnf install docker
systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker
  • Pull a base image from docker hub

Note: It is upto you which image to use. I am using Ubuntu as base image.

docker pull ubuntu:latest
  • List the images to verify the pull
docker images

.. should display ubuntu latest xxxxxxxxxxxx x months ago x MB

  • Build your own image
docker build -t="dolftax/steam"
  • Lets run bash to install sTeam itself and its dependencies
docker run -t -i dolftax/steam /bin/bash
  • Install the packages and its dependencies.

In my case, sTeam server. Installation steps –https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/wiki/Installation-steps#manual

  • Grab latest container ID. The first one would be the recently closed container.
docker ps -a
docker commit [container-id] dolftax/steam:v1

You should get a long hash as the success message

Note: v1 is a tag Don’t use latest tag. Don’t be tempted by it.
  • Create a docker hub account and login
docker login

.. which is self explanatory.

  • Push the image to docker hub (Before that, create a docker hub account anddocker login)
docker push dolftax/steam

Done!

.. after containerizing with docker, sTeam installation is as easy as

docker pull dolftax/steam:v1

Try containerizing your project and you would love it.