Disposable Docker sandbox for quick isolated testing with X support.

$ make build
$ make
[+] Shared directory located at /tmp/playground.QHyGai on the host
user@playground:~$ ls -F
playground/
user@playground:~$ echo $PLAYGROUND
/tmp/playground.QHyGai

Build needs to be performed only once. Then:

$ make [run] [OPTIONS=<options>]

Where <options> are command line arguments passed to docker run. Some useful examples:

• 'OPTIONS=-p 8080:80' to forward the container port 8080 to the host port 80;
• 'OPTIONS=-v /container/folder:/host/folder' to mount additional directories;
• 'OPTIONS=--privileged' to run the container in privileged mode, e.g., to run strace;
• 'OPTIONS=--network none to disable the network access in the container.

The default Makefile rule (try) runs a disposable docker container, use run to keep the container.

A temporary randomly-named host folder is mounted to ~user/playground/ in the container. The actual folder name is stored in the PLAYGROUND environment variable and its content may outlive the container. When the container is terminated the user is prompted to keep or delete the temporary folder. Use the above -v option for persistent shared folders wen the run command is used.

A convenient shell alias is:

alias playground='make -sC /path/to/playground/'

To use X applications on macOS, first start XQuartz then run xhost +localhost to allow X connections from Docker.

It is possible to allow localhost by default by placing the above command in an executable .sh file in the ~/.xinitrc.d directory:

$ mkdir -p ~/.xinitrc.d
$ echo xhost +localhost >~/.xinitrc.d/allow-localhost.sh
$ chmod +x ~/.xinitrc.d/allow-localhost.sh

Rebuild the image from scratch:

$ make build

Commit the state of an existing container to the original image and drop the container:

$ make update CONTAINER=<container>

Remove the image:

$ make clean