Docker build script for Sage

Quickstart

We have a prebuilt docker image at https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/sagemath/sage/. Docker will automatically download and use it if you ask it to run the sagemath/sage image. So just running the following command will bring up a Sage command line without having installed anything before (except docker of course):

docker run --rm -i -t sagemath/sage

All arguments after the sagemath/sage are passed to sage. If you want to run a sage notebook server you probably want to run it detached -d instead of interactively -i, which you can do like this:

docker run --rm -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 -d -t sagemath/sage --notebook=sagenb
docker run --rm -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 -d -t sagemath/sage --notebook=ipython --ip='*' --port=8080

Note that the sage notebook server runs on port 8080 inside the container. The above command maps it to 8080 outside of the container, so you can connect with your usual web browser at http://127.0.0.1:8080. But only from the computer running docker. If you want everybody on the internet to be able to connect, use -p 0.0.0.0:8080:8080 instead.

For Sage development you probably want a terminal at one point. You can open it using

docker run --rm -i -t sagemath/sage -sh

Sage is installed in /opt/sage inside the container.

Restart and Keeping Files

Each docker run commant creates a new container, independent of all other containers. In particular, there is no storage shared: Each container is a completely independent file system. To keep files files after you quit the dockerized Sage, you should

• Not delete the container when exiting Sage (leave out the --rm command line option above).

• Give containers a name so you know which one is which (add the --name=... commandline option).

If you then start a container again you will get back the same files that you had when you quit that particular container. For example, say you run the container for the first time using:

docker run --name=sage-cmdline -i -t sagemath/sage

Then interact with Sage, create files, etc. Then quit Sage, the containers exits but is still stored (does not appear in docker ps but does appear in docker ps -a). To restart the container named sage-cmdline again, you would then just call

docker start -i sage-cmdline

Only when you delete the container using docker rm sage-cmdline any file modifications that you made in that container are permanently lost, unless you explicitly save them with docker commit.

Installation

A reasonably recent Linux distribution will have docker packaged, for example on Fedora/Redhat/Centos run

yum install docker

or Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install docker.io

On OSX and Windows you first have to install the Boot2Docker helper application, which includes a minimal virtual machine to execute docker images.

• OSX: http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/

• Windows: http://docs.docker.com/installation/windows/

Running Boot2Docker then brings up a command line window where you can execute the above docker commands.

See http://docs.docker.com/installation/ for more details.

Build Instructions

To build the docker image yourself, check out the repository and add the Sage source tarball. Adjust the tarball name in the Dockerfile accordingly. Then run

docker build -t yourname/sage path/to/repo/

to build the docker image.