I'm a senior with one semester left for my degree. I started learning about Docker last year and boy did a massive lightbulb go off in my head when I found out about it.
My school, a crappy state school in the midwest that's teaching stuff 10-20 years out of date (but what CS department doesn't), has outdated redhat servers that we have to submit and compile all of our work on. Doesn't matter that I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 and using the latest stable releases of OpenJDK or G++ and all my projects work fine on my computer, only that it works on those ancient redhat machines. So I created a container that had those specific versions of OpenJDK and G++, I no longer had to login to my school's terrible server to do work.
I know this sounds crazy simple and silly but for a self-taught docker user this felt like a major victory. Thanks for reading!
Share it with your peers.
Awesome! Bonus points if you can get IT to install Docker on those RHEL servers so you can use newer libraries for the stuff you turn in.
This is a great use for Docker. You can also take your work with you by saving off your custom images to load on another box if you need to.
Any virtualization platform could help here…
I’m surprised you didn’t share the docker file.
What vintage of rhel are you dealing with? 5? 6 isn’t remarkably old (it is infact still under support), and there are sharable container techs that would work on it that it may be worth writing to the support people (and AG based on your other post, but…that sounds suspect) for this exact scenario. Singularity is the easiest to use because you can convert a docker container into a singularity container for use on systems you don’t own.
Curious which version of RHEL your uni is running. If you’re using 7.x you can use centos7 base images. CentOS is a freely available fork of RHEL – most everything on RHEL matches with CentOS exactly.
Source: software engineer at Red Hat, working on the OpenShift team. Almost all of our images are built on centos7 bases.
Excellent, thanks for sharing.
Just download the latest CentOS 7 version and use virtual box and I’d recommend also looking at vagrant. So you don’t have to rely on older RHEL versions because CentOS is exactly RHEL minus the support and paid license for the OS.
Everyone starts from somewhere. Good job. Your next project should be to build a docker swarm so that you can learn about orchestration
I’d post something like that on [hub.docker.com](https://hub.docker.com). Definitely work it. name it the school and maybe tag it with the version matching the lab computers.
How did you build the image? If from scratch how’d you get a hold of redhat? I looked at doing this briefly for my uni which is running rhel 6.9 but I don’t know how
I did something similar the other day at work, where there was one project still using an older version of Elasticsearch, and everyone, including me, had a newer version installed. So I created a `docker run` one liner that allows you to quickly spin up that same older version to test the application, and then when you’re done, just press Ctrl-C and away it goes.
I got tired of using vagrants and them using all my hard drive space. Spent the past few days trying to get some containers working so I can have a good local dev environment. Finally got it working so now I can keep going down the software engineering rabbit hole.