Using my stardock image on Amazon AWS free tier

Amazon's AWS service is great. I love the fact that it provides a free server to develop on and if I ever need more, I can pay for it.

Just one catch: many of the things I enjoy working with are small enough to fit in RAM to run, but not to build. Perl 6 is a great example. See my previous posting on building a "stardock" container for Perl 6. Anyway, that won't build on Amazon's AWS free tier, so what do I do? Well, I can spin up a local VM under a Windows box to do the build, so here's what I do:

docker build --tag=stardock .
docker save -o stardock.img stardock
scp stardock.img <awshost>:.

And then on the target system:

docker load -i stardock.img
docker run -it stardock perl6 -v

Now you have a build of Perl 6 Rakudo Star from the most recent HEAD, but without having to have enough RAM in your free dev environment on Amazon!

Building bleeding edge Perl 6 as a Docker container

I got tired of re-building Perl 6 on every system I touch, but the public Rakudo Star build of Perl 6 that's available as a Docker image is pretty badly out of date. If you want to get and build the latest and greatest, here's how to do it in a container.

First, create your "Dockerfile" with this as its body:

FROM ubuntu:15.04

RUN apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get clean
RUN apt-get -y install perl && apt-get clean
RUN apt-get -y install git-core && apt-get clean
run apt-get -y install build-essential && apt-get clean

RUN git clone https://github.com/rakudo/star.git
RUN cd star && perl -i.bak -pE \
  's/git\@github.com\:/git\:\/\/github.com\//g' .gitmodules
RUN cd star && git submodule sync && git submodule init && git submodule update
RUN cd star && git clone https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git
RUN cd star && perl Configure.pl \
  --force --prefix=/usr --backends=moar --gen-moar --gen-nqp
RUN cd star && make && make install

CMD [ "shell" ]

Now build your image by running docker build:

$ docker build --tag=stardock .

I call my image stardock. You can call yours whatever you like. Note that the build is too large to fit in some minimal environments. It may fail, for example, on a free tier AWS EC2 instance.

Next, you want to test your build:

$ docker run -it stardock
root@5bf4853308cf:/# perl6 -v
This is perl6 version 2015.06-225-g3bdd0af built on MoarVM version 2015.06-88-g647df11
root@5bf4853308cf:/# perl6 -e 'say "Hello, world!"'
Hello, world!

And there you go, a working Perl 6 built off the latest rev of Rakudo build per the Rakudo-Star release packaging.

Because the point of this is to be up-to-date, you might want to add this line before the "RUN git clone" of Rakudo:

ADD update.txt update.txt

and just "touch update.txt" in your Dockerfile directory before you do the build to force it to pick up the latest Rakudo and rebuild from scratch.