Cogs and Levers A blog full of technical stuff

Docker, Chrome and Ubuntu

08 Oct 2015

Docker provides a very convenient way of packaging your applications and their dependencies so that they can be moved around without too much effort. Another great side-effect of this type of system design is the isolation that you’re given between containers. In today’s post, I’ll walk through the setup of Google Chrome running in an isolated sandbox within Docker and so that it’s nicely integrated into Ubuntu.

Not starting from zero

I have to admit, most of the hard work had already been done for me in Jessie Frazelle’s post about hosting desktop applications in docker containers. The Chrome Dockerfile that I have hosted in my github repository is a pretty good rip, directly from Jessie’s post.

Getting started

Putting together a run script that you can repeatedly call from the operating system shouldn’t be too hard. It only needed to do three things:

  • Create a container when one didn’t exist
  • Start the container if it already existed
  • Open a new window if the container was already started

This is a relatively simple bash script to do this:

CHROME_RUNNING=$(docker inspect --format="" chrome 2> /dev/null)

We want to check if the container is running, first up. I’ve standardised by calling the container chrome. Really creative. Upon successful return from the docker inspect command, the $CHROME_RUNNING variable should either be true or false. If the inspect call didn’t go to plan, it’s most likely because the container doesn’t exist and we need to use run to kick it into gear:

docker run \
    -it \
    --net host \
    --cpuset-cpus 0 \
    --memory 512mb \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -e DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY \
    -v $HOME/Downloads:/root/Downloads \
    -v $HOME/.config/google-chrome/:/data \
    --device /dev/snd \
    -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm \
    --name chrome \
    tuttlem/chrome

This gets the container up and running and the browser under our noses.

In cases where the container already exists, but isn’t running we’ll use run. When the container exists and it is running, the only reason why someone could be invoking this script is to get another browser window running; so we’ll use exec to get chrome to open up a new window for us:

if [ "$CHROME_RUNNING" == "false" ]; then
    docker start chrome
else
    docker exec chrome sh -c "/usr/bin/google-chrome '$@' --user-data-dir=/data"
fi

By using the $@ variable in the exec script, we can take in any web address that’s passed into this script. This is what will allow us to integrate this container into our operating system.

Integration

We’ve done just about everything now with the run script. I’ve created myself a menu item with a chrome icon that just points to this run script:

The main key binding of Super + W, but the most important is changing the preferred browser so that it invokes the script. %s passes the desired web site through for a seamless finish.

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