Defining start conditions for the container

Next, we will start moving towards a more meaningful image. youtube-dl is a program that downloads youtube videos https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html. Let's add it to an image - but this time, we will change our process. Instead of our current process where we add things to the Dockerfile hope it works, let's try another approach. This time we will open up an interactive session and test stuff before "storing" it in our Dockerfile. By following the youtube-dl install instructions we will see that:

$ docker run -it ubuntu:18.04
  root@8c587232a608:/# curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
  bash: curl: command not found

..and, as we already know, curl is not installed - let's add curl with apt-get again.

$ apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl
$ curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

At some point, you may have noticed that sudo is not installed either, but since we are root we don't need it.

Next, we will add permissions and run it:

$ chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ youtube-dl
  /usr/bin/env: 'python': No such file or directory

Okay - On the top of the youtube-dl download page we notice this message:

Remember youtube-dl requires Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+ to work except for Windows exe.

So we will add python

$ apt-get install -y python

And let's run it again

$ youtube-dl

  WARNING: Assuming --restrict-filenames since file system encoding cannot encode all characters. Set the LC_ALL environment variable to fix this.
  Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

  youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.
  Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.

It works (we just need to give an URL), but we notice that it outputs a warning about LC_ALL. In a regular Ubuntu desktop/server install the localization settings are (usually) set, but in this image they are not set, as we can see by running env in our container. To fix this without installing additional locales, see this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41648500

$ LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 youtube-dl

And it works! Let's persist it for our session and try downloading a video:

$ export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
$ youtube-dl https://imgur.com/JY5tHqr

So now when we know exactly what we need. Starting FROM ubuntu:18.04, add these to our Dockerfile. We should always try to keep the most prone to change rows at the bottom, by adding the instructions to the bottom we can preserve our cached layers - this is handy practise to speed up creating the initial version of a Dockerfile when it has time consuming operations like downloads. Also added WORKDIR, this will ensure the videos will be downloaded there.

FROM ubuntu:18.04

WORKDIR /mydir

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl python
RUN curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
RUN chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

ENV LC_ALL=C.UTF-8

CMD ["/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl"]

• Instead of using RUN export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 we store the environment directly in the image with ENV

• We also override bash as our image command (set on the base image) with youtube-dl itself. This will not work, but let's see why.

When we build this as youtube-dl and run it:

$ docker build -t youtube-dl .
  ...

$ docker run youtube-dl

  Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

  youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.

  Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.

So far so good, but now the natural way to use this image would be to give the URL as an argument:

$ docker run youtube-dl https://imgur.com/JY5tHqr

  /usr/local/bin/docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:296: starting container process caused "exec: \"https://imgur.com/JY5tHqr\": stat https://imgur.com/JY5tHqr: no such file or directory": unknown.

  ERRO[0001] error waiting for container: context canceled

As we now know, the argument we gave it is replacing the command or CMD. We need a way to have something before the command. Luckily we have a way to do this: we can use ENTRYPOINT to define the main executable and then docker will combine our run arguments for it.

FROM ubuntu:18.04

WORKDIR /mydir

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl python
RUN curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
RUN chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

ENV LC_ALL=C.UTF-8

# Replacing CMD with ENTRYPOINT
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl"]

And now it works like it should:

$ docker build -t youtube-dl .
$ docker run youtube-dl https://imgur.com/JY5tHqr

  [Imgur] JY5tHqr: Downloading webpage
  [download] Destination: Imgur-JY5tHqr.mp4
  [download] 100% of 190.20KiB in 00:0044MiB/s ETA 00:000

With ENTRYPOINT docker run now executed the combined /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl https://imgur.com/JY5tHqr inside the container with that command!

ENTRYPOINT vs CMD can be confusing - in a properly set up image such as our youtube-dl the command represents an argument list for the entrypoint. By default entrypoint is set as /bin/sh and this is passed if no entrypoint is set. This is why giving path to a script file as CMD works: you're giving the file as a parameter to /bin/sh.

In addition, there are two ways to set them: exec form and shell form. We've been using the exec form where the command itself is executed. In shell form the command that is executed is wrapped with /bin/sh -c - it's useful when you need to evaluate environment variables in the command like $MYSQL_PASSWORD or similar.

In the shell form the command is provided as a string without brackets. In the exec form the command and it's arguments are provided as a list (with brackets), see the table below:

As the command at the end of docker run will be the CMD we want to use ENTRYPOINT to specify what to run, and CMD to specify which command (in our case url) to run.

Most of the time we can ignore ENTRYPOINT when building our images and only use CMD. For example, ubuntu image defaults the ENTRYPOINT to bash so we do not have to worry about it. And it gives us the convenience of allowing us to overwrite the CMD easily, for example, with bash to go inside the container.

We can test how some other projects do this. Let's try python:

$ docker pull python:3.8
...
$ docker run -it python:3.8
  Python 3.8.2 (default, Mar 31 2020, 15:23:55)
  [GCC 8.3.0] on linux
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  >>> print("Hello, World!")
  Hello, World!
  >>> exit()

$ docker run -it python:3.8 --version
  docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:370: starting container process caused: exec: "--version": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown.

$ docker run -it python:3.8 bash
  root@1b7b99ae2f40:/#

From this experimentation we learned that they have ENTRYPOINT as something other than python, but the CMD is python and we can overwrite it, here with bash. If they had ENTRYPOINT as python we'd be able to run —version. We can create our own image for personal use as we did in a previous exercise with a new Dockerfile.

FROM python:3.8
ENTRYPOINT ["python3"]
CMD ["--help"]

The result is an image that has python as ENTRYPOINT and you can add the commands at the end, for example —version to see the version. Without overwriting the command, it will output the help.

Now we have two problems with the youtube-dl project:

• Major: The downloaded files stay in the container

• Minor: Our container build process creates many layers resulting in increased image size

We will fix the major issue first. The minor issue will get our attention in part 3.

By inspecting docker container ls -a we can see all our previous runs. When we filter this list with

$ docker container ls -a --last 3

  CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                   CREATED                  STATUS                          PORTS               NAMES
  be9fdbcafb23        youtube-dl          "/usr/local/bin/yout…"    Less than a second ago   Exited (0) About a minute ago                       determined_elion
  b61e4029f997        f2210c2591a1        "/bin/sh -c \"/usr/lo…"   Less than a second ago   Exited (2) About a minute ago                       vigorous_bardeen
  326bb4f5af1e        f2210c2591a1        "/bin/sh -c \"/usr/lo…"   About a minute ago       Exited (2) 3 minutes ago                            hardcore_carson

We see that the last container was be9fdbcafb23 or determined_elion for us humans.

$ docker diff determined_elion

  C /mydir
  A /mydir/Imgur-JY5tHqr.mp4

Let's try docker cp command to copy the file. We can use quotes if the filename has spaces.

$ docker cp "determined_elion://mydir/Imgur-JY5tHqr.mp4" .

And now we have our file locally. Sadly, this is not sufficient to fix our issue, so let's continue: