docker-catools

A compact distribution of common EPICS Channel Access and PV Access tools via Docker images.

Available on the Docker Hub at: /r/pklaus/catools.

Available Tools

The following executables from EPICS are part of this Docker image:

acctst      caEventRate  caput    iocLogServer  pvinfo
aitGen      caRepeater   casw     makeBpt       pvlist
antelope    ca_test      catime   msi           pvmonitor
ascheck     caget        e_flex   p2p           pvput
caConnTest  cainfo       excas    pvcall        softIoc
caDirServ   camonitor    genApps  pvget         softIocPVA

Tag Flavours

There are two flavours of the images available:

• slim no underlying Linux system, just executables and libraries,
• debian based on Debian (slighly larger).

Each tag is built for multiple architectures (linux-{amd64,386,arm64,arm/v7}).

The default tag :latest is pointing to the latest debian image.

Examples

caget of a process variable from an IOC in the (Docker internal) network docker-epics.

docker run \
  --rm \
  --network docker-epics \
  pklaus/catools \
  caget FAIR:CBM:MVD:YOUR:PV

camonitor works too, but for being able to quit the process using Ctrl-c it needs to be run with a PID higher than 1. This can be reached by wrapping the call in a shell command or by specifying the host namespace for the PID in the docker run statement:

docker run \
  --rm \
  --pid host \
  --network docker-epics \
  pklaus/catools \
  camonitor FAIR:CBM:MVD:YOUR:PV

If such a command was accidentally started without specifying a different PID it won't quit with Ctrl-c, the terminal can be disattached from the container using Ctrl-p Ctrl-q and the container can then be killed with docker kill using the hash revealed by docker ps.

When using a more elaborate tool such as the softIoc, I recommend to use the debian flavour of the images.