One of the most frustrating things for me is when a new version of a software is released with a fix, feature, or otherwise useful addition I’d like to use, but the package maintainers for my Linux distro haven’t caught up yet. Some of the packages are so far behind it’s silly. I recently decided that for software I use regularly, and is updated regularly, I was going to start using a Docker container to build it and keep my machine clear of all the unnecessary dev packages. This serves the other purpose of being able to share the build environment with others. I wanted to drop a link to my DockerHub account here, where you can find the images I’ve built for building software I like to use. Keep an eye on it, I will probably add more as time goes on.

The DockerHub images link back to my GitHub, and I’m using the auto-build feature so that when I update the Dockerfile and scripts to build the software, it gets rebuilt over at DockerHub automatically.

Here’s an example of one of the builders for W1HKJ’s FlDigi software suite. Simply run the container volume mounting in some working directory to /opt/source in the container, and the build script finds the latest source, downloads, untars, and builds it, spitting out the results in your working directory.

jacob@jacob-aspire:/tmp/fldigi$ docker run --rm -v $PWD:/opt/source jacobcalvert/fldigi-build:latest 
Building fldigi-4.1.18
--2021-05-26 12:39:39--  http://www.w1hkj.com/files//fldigi/fldigi-4.1.18.tar.gz
Resolving www.w1hkj.com (www.w1hkj.com)... 143.95.246.118
Connecting to www.w1hkj.com (www.w1hkj.com)|143.95.246.118|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 4847091 (4.6M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: 'fldigi-4.1.18.tar.gz'

     0K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  1%  736K 6s
    50K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  2% 1.53M 5s
   100K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  3% 2.52M 4s
   150K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  4% 27.7M 3s
   200K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  5% 3.33M 2s
   250K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  6% 2.67M 2s
   300K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  7% 28.3M 2s
   350K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  8% 8.94M 2s
   400K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  9% 9.29M 2s
   450K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 10% 7.04M 1s
   500K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 11% 4.42M 1s
   550K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 12% 8.31M 1s

  <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< snipped for brevity >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all-am'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/opt/source/flrig-1.3.54'
Done!!
jacob@jacob-aspire:/tmp/fldigi$ ll
total 11224
drwxrwxr-x  5 jacob jacob    4096 May 26 13:05 ./
drwxrwxrwt 18 root  root     4096 May 26 13:05 ../
drwxr-xr-x  9 jacob jacob    4096 May 26 13:05 fldigi-4.1.18/
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root  4847091 Jan 29 06:50 fldigi-4.1.18.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root  4847091 Jan 29 06:50 fldigi-4.1.18.tar.gz.1
drwxrwxr-x  7 jacob jacob    4096 May 26 12:45 flmsg-4.0.17/
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root   876560 Sep  8  2020 flmsg-4.0.17.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  7 jacob jacob    4096 May 26 12:46 flrig-1.3.54/
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root   891644 Feb  3 08:35 flrig-1.3.54.tar.gz