Docker stan images for testing?

Developers
1

Hi!

Lately I have been running against many walls when messing with compilers/make/other system related stuff. At the end I was forced to install a VirtualBox on my machine to be able to reproduce errors happening on other systems to make progress.

From this experience I really think that we should make the effort and turn all our testing environments into some docker based thing. The thing is that I am not really experienced with docker. Thus, if people agree that we should do this (I really think so), I am calling out here if people have

  • cmdstan docker images suitable as basis for our testing for mac and for linux
  • we may consider to use the Travis docker images (but they use a really old 14.04 ubuntu LTS)

… or is setting up docker so simple that someone with Unix experience can get that done in no time?

It is really a huge time-killer if tests break on test-systems, but pass locally which is what this approach should hopefully avoid.

Best,
Sebastian

1 Like
2

I use Docker a lot (maybe too much), and for Stan I have a Dockerfile like this

FROM python:3.6-stretch

ENV CSVER=2.17.1
ENV CXX=clang++-3.9

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y clang-3.9

WORKDIR /opt/
RUN curl -OL https://github.com/stan-dev/cmdstan/releases/download/v$CSVER/cmdstan-$CSVER.tar.gz \
 && tar xzf cmdstan-$CSVER.tar.gz \
 && rm -rf cmdstan-$CSVER.tar.gz \
 && mv cmdstan-$CSVER cmdstan
 && cd cmdstan \
 && make -j8 build examples/bernoulli/Bernoulli

WORKDIR /opt/cmdstan

build with

docker build -t cmdstan:2.17.1 .

then run w/ something like

alias runstan='docker run --rm -it -v `pwd`:/opt/cmdstan/work cmdstan:2.17.1 '

runstan make work/model
runstan work/model sample ...
runstan bin/stansummary ...

Similar images could be done for RStan, PyStan, etc and pushed to Docker hub so that Docker-savy users can just

docker pull stan/cmdstan
docker run stan/cmdstan ....

Hope that helps…

edit these work great with CI systems, including Travis whose packages are hopelessly out of date
edit fix wrong command

5 Likes
3

Thanks much. That should get me started.

Software served in a clean container sounds like a real solution.

4

Does the ENV CXX flag import the relevant compiler into the docker image? If not, I wouldn’t think it would solve the containment problem.

The cmdstan image should bring in an encapsulated version of Stan (with stan and math included with dependent libraries for Eigen and Boost).

5

Relevant compiler needs to be installed to a container. Then cxx flag works.

Not sure what does the “import” mean here.

6

ENV CXX sets a environment variable, which is picked up by Make. The compiler installed in the subsequent step apt-get install ... clang-3.9.

Docker images like this can be based on existing images, so if there was a another base Stan image stan/base, one would start the CmdStan Dockerfile with FROM stan/base instead of the Python image I used above.

edit any toolchain configuration would be done once in the base image and then descendant images for eg CmdStan can assume a working toolchain.