Set up a Developer Workstation#

This page will guide you through the steps to set up a developer workstation in readiness for the remaining tutorials. The tools you need to install are:

Visual Studio Code
a container platform, either podman or docker
Python 3.10 or later + a Python virtual environment
git client for version control

Visual Studio Code is recommended because it has excellent integration with devcontainers. It also has useful extensions for working with Kubernetes, EPICS, WSL2 and more.

Options#

You are not required to use VSCode to develop with epics-containers. If you have your own preferred code editor you can use that.

See these how-to pages for more information:

Working with your own code editor

Platform Support#

epics-containers can use Linux, Windows or MacOS as the host operating system for the developer workstation.

If you are using Windows then you must first install WSL2 and then work within the Linux subsystem. see WSL2 installation instructions. Ubuntu is recommended as the Linux distribution for WSL2.

Installation Steps#

Setup VSCode#

Note

DLS Users: You can access VSCode with module load vscode.

First download and install Visual Studio Code.

VSCode has a huge library of extensions. The following list of extensions are useful for working with epics-containers. You will need to install the Required extensions before proceeding to the next tutorial. See the links for instructions on how to do this.

The recommended extensions will be installed for you when you launch the devcontainer in the next tutorial.

Required: Remote Development
Required for Windows: VSCode WSL2 (see How to use WSL2 and Visual Studio Code)
Recommended: VSCode EPICS
Recommended: Kubernetes

Setup Docker or Podman#

Note

DLS Users: RHEL 8 Workstations at DLS have podman 4.4.1 installed by default. RHEL 7 Workstations are not supported.

Next install docker or podman as your container platform. epics-containers has been tested with podman 4.4.1 on RedHat 8, and Docker 24.0.5 on for Ubuntu 22.04.

If you are using docker, simply replace podman with docker in the commands listed in these tutorials.

The podman version required is 4.0 or later. Any version of docker since 20.10 will also work. Pick the tool that has the most recent version for your platform. RedHat 8 and above have recent podman versions. Debian platforms don’t yet have recent podman versions available. If you have a choice then podman is preferred because it does not require root access and it is the tool with which epics-containers has had the most testing.

The links below have details of how to install your choice of container platform:

The docker install page encourages you to install Docker Desktop. This is a paid for product and is not required for this tutorial. You can install the free linux CLI tools by clicking on the appropriate linux distribution link.

Install Python#

Note

DLS Users: use module load python/3.11

Go ahead and install Python 3.10 or later. 3.11 is recommended as this is the highest version that epics-containers has been tested with.

There are instructions for installing Python on all platforms here: https://docs.python-guide.org/starting/installation/

Once you have python set up a virtual environment for your epics-containers work. In the examples we will use $HOME/ec-venv as the virtual environment but you can choose any folder.

python -m venv $HOME/ec-venv
source $HOME/ec-venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Note that each time you open a new shell you will need to activate the virtual environment again. (Or place its bin folder in your path permanently).

edge-containers-cli#

Above we set up a python virtual environment. Now we will install the edge-containers-cli python tool into that environment.

pip install edge-containers-cli

This is the developer’s ‘outside of the container’ helper tool. The command line entry point is ec. We will be using many ec command line functions in the next tutorial.

See Command Line Interface for IOC Management for more details.

Note

DLS Users: ec is already installed for you on dls_sw just do the following to make sure it is always available:

# use the ec version from dls_sw/work/python3
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/bin
ln -fs /dls_sw/work/python3/ec-venv/bin/ec $HOME/.local/bin/ec

Git#

If you don’t already have git installed see https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git. Any recent version of git will work.

Kubernetes#

You don’t need Kubernetes yet.

The following tutorials will take you through creating, deploying and debugging IOC instances, generic IOCs and support modules.

For simplicity we don’t encourage using Kubernetes at this stage. Instead we will deploy containers to the local workstation’s docker or podman instance.

However, everything in these tutorials would also work with Kubernetes. If you are particularly interested in Kubernetes then you can jump to Setup a Kubernetes Server and follow the instructions there. Then come back to this point and continue with the tutorials. If you do this just be aware that we use the beamline name bl01t for local deployment examples and bl46p for Kubernetes examples so you will need to substitute the appropriate beamline name for your environment. All the local deployment examples should also deploy to a Kubernetes cluster.

If you are planning not to use Kubernetes at all then now might be a good time to install an alternative container management platform such as Portainer. Such tools will help you visualise and manage your local containers. They are not required and you could just manage everything from epics-containers command line interface if you prefer.