Resolve error that occurs when docker task is run as non-root user about girder_worker

[zachmullen]

@jcfr beat me to it :)

[jcfr]

Assuming the docker images you are running does not already have an entrypoint, you could do something like this:

docker run -e USER_ID=$(id -u) -e GROUP_ID=$(id -g) -v /path/to/docker_entrypoint.sh:/root/docker_entrypoint.sh:ro --entrypoint /root/docker_entrypoint.sh  imagename command args

See also https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#entrypoint-default-command-to-execute-at-runtime

You could generalize the docker_entrypoint.sh I created by adding it to girder_worker repo. May be a new name could be docker_userconf_entrypoint.sh ?

On a related topic: https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker/wiki/Sharing-files-with-host-machine

[zachmullen]

Is there some way inside your image to make it so that matplotlib doesn't try to lookup the user from the password database? It looks like it's trying to create a temp directory and wants to include the user's name in the directory name, is there maybe some way to explicitly instruct matplotlib (maybe via environment variable) to not do this behavior?

There is a general solution to this that would support container operations performing system user lookups, but it's dirty. Namely, we could inject a shell script into the container via the temp dir mounted volume. This script would first create a new user with the given UID if one did not already exist, then the script would delete itself and run whatever the client-specified entrypoint was.

Let me know if you foresee any problems with that hack, or if there is an easier way.

[jcfr]

Cc: @thewtex