cmiles74/docker-emacs-js-clojure repository overview

⁠Emacs with Javascript and Clojure

You can pull this image from Docker Hub.

docker pull cmiles74/docker-emacs-js-clojure

This project provides a Docker image that includes a reasonably new and working version of Emacs, OpenJDK 8, NodeJS and NVM. I use this image for developing web applications in Clojure. In this image, Emacs is bundled with Spacemacs⁠ and the image is built on Arch Linux⁠.

⁠Running the Image

This project includes a script that will start the image and launch Emacs and a start a terminal session. You will likely want to customize this script to meet your own needs.

#!/bin/bash

# allow all docker hosts to our X server
xhost + 172.17.0

# start docker and emacs
docker run \
      -d \
      -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw \
      -v ${PWD}/project:/project \
      -e DISPLAY=unix${DISPLAY} \
      --device /dev/snd \
      --name docker-emacs \
      cmiles74/emacs-js-clojure

docker exec docker-emacs /developer/bin/start-terminal

The script above allows containers on your local machine to communicat with your X server, then starts up Emacs and the terminal session. In order for the image to function, we map in the X server socket and then set some environment variables.

⁠Getting a Shell in the Container

Once the container is up and running, you'll immediately be presented with an Emacs window. In addition to running a terminal in the container and displaying it on your local machine, You can also get a shell running by issuing the following command:

docker exec -it docker-emacs /bin/bash

This will run bash from inside the container. You can also pull up a terminal from inside Emacs, it's a matter of preference.

⁠Installing Node

The latest version of Node and NPM are installed by default as well as some NPM packages used by Emacs. If you need a specific version of Node or specific packages, NVM is supplied and you're encouraged to use it. :-)

Once you have the image up-and-running, you'll need to install Node. You can create an .nvmrc file in the root of your project. NVM will inspect that file and automatically choose the right version of node. For instance, to use the latest LTS release...

echo "lts/*" > .nvmrc

Then install node...

nvm install

Then you can "use" that version of node.

nvm use

If you do need to install additional NPM packages, you can use sudo to run the command as "root".`