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 docker or podman and docker-compose

• Python 3.10 or later + a Python virtual environment

• git client for version control (Configured for the current user, with read-write access for Repository Contents and Workflows.)

If you prefer to use a virtual machine, we provide a VirtualBox appliance with all the software pre-installed. This is the easiest way to get started.

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

Note

Using a Personal Access Token (PAT): If following the tutorials on an untrusted machine, using a PAT for authentication is encouraged as it can be scoped and time bound. For Github users a new token can be created via Settings -> Developer Settings -> Personal access tokens -> Fine-grained tokens. Give your new token R/W access to Repository Contents and Workflows.

# Remember credentials for 5 hours duration
git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout 18000'
# When asked to login
Username for `https://github.com': <ENTER YOUR USERNAME>
Password for `https://<YOUR USERNAME>@github.com': <ENTER YOUR PAT>

When using Personal Access Tokens, replace git@github.com: with https://github.com/ throughout these tutorials.

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

The containers used in the tutorials are x86_64 Linux. The best way to experience the tutorials is to use an Intel Linux workstation or laptop. arm64 container images have been tested but are not yet widely used in the available images.

Whatever your platform, if you can install virtualbox, then you can work using the applicance we provide.

In all cases you will need an internet connection to download the software and the container images. (if you are at DLS you do not need access to DLS network resources, only the internet).

Platform	Requirements
Any Linux	admin rights only: go to Installation Steps
Windows	Virtualbox: go to VirtualBox Appliance
Mac x86	Virtualbox: go to VirtualBox Appliance
Mac M1	??
DLS RHEL 8	go to Installation Steps

VirtualBox Appliance

This section is for those that want to use a virtual machine to run the tutorials. If you already have a linux distribution with admin permissions and you want to work with that instead, please go to Installation Steps below.

If you are using a Mac or Windows then the simplest approach is to use the Linux Virtual Machine with pre-installed software that we provide.

First install VirtualBox and then download the Virtual Machine. The downloaded file is an OVA file which can be imported into VirtualBox using File->Import Appliance ...

During the import process you will be able to modify the resources that the VM uses, the defaults are recommended, but you may decrease them if your host machine has limited resources. We recommend 8GB of RAM and 4 CPUs for the VM but more is better for the developer container tutorials!

Now start the VM and log in as ec-demo with password demo1.

This VM has the following software pre-installed:

• Ubuntu 22.04

• Python 3.10

• Visual Studio Code

• Docker

• zsh shell with oh-my-zsh

You will need to complete the following steps to personalize the VM:

• Set up your github credentials

• Set up your python virtual environment

• Set up your docker or podman CLI completion if you want it

Now jump to Command Line Completion below.

Installation Steps

If you are using your own Linux machine then follow all the steps below to install the required software.

Setup VSCode

Note

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

First download and install Visual Studio Code.

• Download Visual Studio Code

• Setup 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.

• 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 4.9.4 installed by default. RHEL 7 Workstations are not supported.

If this is the first time you have used podman OR you are using a DLS Redhat laptop then you must perform the following steps:

# setup the podman config folders in your home directory
/dls_sw/apps/setup-podman/setup.sh
# disable se labels in mounted folders for podman
sed -i ~/.config/containers/containers.conf -e '/label=false/d' -e '/^\[containers\]$/a label=false'

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

The podman version required is 4.0 or later. Any version of docker since 20.10 will also work.

Because we use docker compose which is built in to later versions of docker, we recommend using docker if you have a choice.

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

• Install docker

• Install podman

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 under the “Supported Platforms” heading, for simplicity it is easiest to use the option “Install using the convenience script”.

Docker Compose For Podman Users

docker compose allows you to define and run multi-container Docker applications. epics-containers uses it for describing a set of IOCs and other services that are deployed together.

If you installed docker using the above instructions then docker compose is already installed. If you installed podman then you will need to install docker compose separately. We prefer to use docker-compose instead of podman-compose because it is more widely used and avoids behaviour differences between the two tools. If you are at DLS you just need to run ‘module load docker-compose’ to get access to docker compose with podman as the back end.

Other users of podman please see these instructions rootless podman with docker-compose. You need only read the section titled “Start the Podman system service” (the rest of the page validates the setup).

Important Notes Regarding docker and podman

From here on when we refer to docker in a command line, you can replace it with podman if you are using podman. The two tools have (almost) the same CLI. For convenience if you are a podman user you might want to place

alias docker=podman

in your $HOME/.bashrc (or $HOME/.zshrc for zsh users).

docker users should also take a look at this page: Working with Docker which describes a couple of extra steps that are required to make docker work in developer containers.

Command Line Completion

This is an optional step to set up CLI completion for docker or podman.

It is much easier to investigate the commands available to you with command line completion enabled. You need only do the following steps once to permanently enable this feature for docker and docker compose.

# these steps will make cli completion work for bash
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions
docker completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/docker
# OR
podman completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/podman

# these steps will make cli completion work for zsh
mkdir -p ~/.oh-my-zsh/completions
docker completion zsh > ~/.oh-my-zsh/completions/_docker
# OR
podman completion zsh > ~/.oh-my-zsh/completions/_podman

Install Python

Note

DLS Users: for this step just use module load python/3.11

Go ahead and install Python if it is not already installed, the minimum version you should use is 3.10. Virtualbox Appliance users will already have Python 3.10 installed.

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

Setup virtual environment

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.

Note

DLS Users: As $HOME is a network drive it has an 8GB limit, consider other locations such as /dls/science/ or /scratch/. Read more here

python3 -m venv $HOME/ec-venv
source $HOME/ec-venv/bin/activate
python3 -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 by adding PATH=$HOME/ec-venv/bin:$PATH in your $HOME/.bashrc (or $HOME/.zshrc for zsh users)).

copier

Above we set up a python virtual environment. Now we will install copier which is used to copy the templates for the services repositories and generic IOCs. Also you could take this opportunity to install the ec tool that we will use later when we get to the Kubernetes tutorials.

pip install copier
pip install edge-containers-cli

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.

You will also want to set up your git user name and email address:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your email"

And set up your git credentials so that you can access your personal github repositories. Your choices are:

• use a Personal Access Token (PAT) as described in the first section above.

• setup an ssh key following the instructions here.

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 using docker compose.

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 containers across a number of servers. These are not required and you could just manage everything from the docker compose command line if you prefer.