scientificlinux/sl repository overview

⁠Dockerfiles

This repository provides Dockerfiles for Scientific Linux⁠ on docker hub⁠.

Each release is in its own branch⁠ and contains the kickstart used to build the image.

These images are maintained by the Scientific Linux Team in github⁠.

⁠Container Tags

A tag will be provided for each of the maintained major releases⁠ of Scientific Linux (6, 7).

The latest tag will track the highest version numbered release of Scientific Linux.

Updated images will be released roughly once per month.

⁠Build Logs

The root filesystem for these docker images is built on our internal build system and packaged at Docker Cloud⁠.

⁠Getting Help

• SL Faq⁠

• Email Lists⁠

⁠Docker, overlayfs, and yum

Recent Docker versions support the overlayfs⁠ backend, which is enabled by default on most distros supporting it from Docker 1.13 onwards. On SL 6 and 7, that backend requires yum-plugin-ovl to be installed and enabled, which it is in our containers. Make it sure you retain the plugins=1 option in /etc/yum.conf if you update that file; otherwise, you may encounter errors related to rpmdb checksum failure - see Docker ticket 10180⁠ for more details.

⁠Package docs and licence files

By default the SL docker images do not include these files. If you require them, please remove tsflags=nodocs from /etc/yum.conf and run yum reinstall mypackage to recieve the documentation.

⁠Quick Reference

⁠Example Usage

You can try out the containers via:

$ docker pull scientificlinux/sl
$ docker run -it scientificlinux/sl:6 cat /etc/redhat-release
$ docker run -it scientificlinux/sl:7 cat /etc/redhat-release

⁠Enabling systemd in SL7

The SL7 docker container ships with systemd mostly functional. You can build a SL7 systemd enabled container with the following Dockerfile

In order to run a container with systemd, you will need to mount the cgroups volumes from the host.

# Example SL7 systemd Dockerfile
FROM sl:7
ENV container docker
### This example enables httpd via systemd within the container
RUN yum -y install httpd && yum clean all && systemctl enable httpd.service
EXPOSE 80
### End of example commands for httpd via systemd
VOLUME [ "/sys/fs/cgroup" ]
CMD ["/usr/sbin/init"]

You can build and run this example (with apache) via:

$ docker build --rm -t local/mycontainer your/path
$ docker run -ti -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro -p 80:80 local/mycontainer

Which will run systemd within the container in a limited context.

It is recommended that you install any relevant OCI hooks⁠ for your container host - such as oci-register-machine or oci-systemd-hook.

Some container hosts must add --tmpfs /run to the docker run command.

⁠About Scientific Linux

Scientific Linux is a Fermilab⁠ sponsored project. Our primary user base is within the High Energy and High Intensity Physics community. However, our users come from a wide variety of industries with various use cases all over the globe – and sometimes off of it!

Our Mission:

Scientific Linux is a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (property of Red Hat Inc. NYSE:RHT).

Please see About Scientific Linux⁠ and Why Make Scientific Linux⁠ for more information.