anki/docs/docker

Anki in Docker

This is an example of how you can build and run Anki from inside Docker. This approach keeps everything inside Docker images, and sends the GUI to an X11 display over TCP/IP. This approach keeps things tidy, so may be a good choice for if you wish to build Anki irregularly and don't want to build it outside of Docker.

It takes longer to build after small changes however, so for development, if you wish to use Docker, the approach in the build scripts may be more appropriate.

Build the Docker image

For best results, enable BuildKit (export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1).

When in this current directory, one can build the Docker image like this:

docker build --tag anki --file Dockerfile ../../

When this is done, run docker image ls to see that the image has been created.

If one wants to build from the project's root directory, use this command:

docker build --tag anki --file docs/docker/Dockerfile .

Run the Docker image

Anki starts a graphical user interface, and this requires some extra setup on the user's end. These instructions were tested on Linux (Debian 11) and will have to be adapted for other operating systems.

To allow the Docker container to pull up a graphical user interface, we need to run the following:

xhost +local:root

Once done using Anki, undo this with

xhost -local:root

Then, we will construct our docker run command:

docker run --rm -it \
    --name anki \
    --volume $HOME/.local/share:$HOME/.local/share:rw \
    --volume /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw \
    --env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    anki

Here is a breakdown of some of the arguments:

• Mount the current user's ~/.local/share directory onto the container. Anki saves things into this directory, and if we don't mount it, we will lose any changes once the container exits. We mount this as read-write (rw) because we want to make changes here.

  --volume $HOME/.local/share:$HOME/.local/share:rw
  

• Mount /etc/passwd so we can enter the container as ourselves. We mount this as read-only because we definitely do not want to modify this.

  --volume /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro
  

• Enter the container with our user ID and group ID, so we stay as ourselves.

  --user $(id -u):$(id -g)
  

• Mount the X11 directory that allows us to open displays.

  --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw
  

• Pass the DISPLAY variable to the container, so it knows where to display graphics.

  --env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY
  

Running Dockerized Anki easily from the command line

One can create a shell function that executes the docker run command. Then one can simply run anki on the command line, and Anki will open in Docker. Make sure to change the image name to whatever you used when building Anki.

anki() {
    docker run --rm -it \
        --name anki \
        --volume $HOME/.local/share:$HOME/.local/share:rw \
        --volume /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro \
        --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
        --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw \
        --env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
        anki "$@"
}