Description

Provides a Dockerfile to build a docker image allowing you to run a BOINC client in a container.

For a dockerized boinccmd command to control this client, see the docker-boinccmd repository.

Why?

3 simple reasons:

• I occasionally want to run BOINC on a machine that isn't mine, and it's either restricted or I don't want it to be visible or to leave stray data on the machine.

• I didn't find a decent Dockerfile for this yet that I could use directly, and I figured others might like to have one.

• It serves as a good test-bed for me to learn about docker for other purposes, as it could require me to use a lot of its features on the long run if it matures into something decent: volumes, data containers, links, compose, etc...

Pull From DockerHub

docker pull laurentmalvert/docker-boinc

Build It Yourself

docker -t boinc .

Usage

Starting the boinc BOINC Client

# start the boinc-client, allowing connections from any host
docker run          \
       --name boinc \
       -d           \
       laurentmalvert/docker-boinc --allow_remote_gui_rpc

Remote Control

You can control your BOINC client using the boinccmd command-line tool. See its documentation for usage details.

See also the docker-boinccmd repo for a dockerized version of boinccmd and usage examples.

Data persistence

To persist data add the -v /path/to/host/directory:/var/lib/boinc-client flag to the docker run command

Configuration persistence

To use a persistent configuration you can either mount /etc/boinc-client as a volume or you can mount /var/lib/boinc-client as a volume and add your configuration files to that directory.

If you want to extract the default configuration files run the container without a volume and run docker cp boinc:/etc/boinc-client /path/to/copy/to

Virtualbox

Some boinc projects use Virtualbox. Virtualbox isn't installed in this image due to size and techinical complications.

If you wish to use Virtualbox then first on the host machine you need to install Virtualbox and Virtualbox kernel module See here https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads for details of installing.

Next you need to install the same version of Virtualbox in your container, to do this creata a docker file which contains the following:

FROM laurentmalvert/docker-boinc
RUN apt-get update \
    && apt-get -y install wget \
    && wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | apt-key add - \
    && echo 'deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian jessie contrib' >> /etc/apt/sources.list \
    && apt-get update && apt-get -y install virtualbox-5.1

Replacing virtualbox-5.1 with whatever version you installed on your host machine.

You then need to add the --device=/dev/vboxdrv flag to your docker run command i.e. /usr/bin/docker run --device=/dev/vboxdrv --name boinc yourimage --allow_remote_gui_rpc

Possible Improvements ?

• Provide some preset startup scripts.

Contributors

• laurent-malvert
• rwky