Phoromatic Server - Docker Container

The Phoronix Test Suite is a comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for Linux, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and BSD operating systems. I have been running it on RedHat Openshift.

Running on RedHat OpenShift

Getting this application containerized required some significant experimentation and some guidance from the developer. I started with this example; however, I have made some adjustments from there due to some challenges I had with the way Openshift differs from Docker.

Random User ID

OpenShift does not by default run as the root user; rather it assigns a random UID as the container's user ID. So I needed to ensure that the directories I used were accessible by a random user.

RUN chmod -R ugo+rw ${PHORONIX_CACHE} &&\
    chmod -R ugo+rwx ${INSTALL_DIR} &&\
    chmod -R ugo+rw /var/lib &&\
    chmod -R ugo+rw /etc 

Ensuring the Application Runs as a Service

In order for the container to stay running and not trigger a Press [ENTER] to kill server... prompt, the directories need to be set up with the correct permissions. If the user has write access to /var/lib and /etc, then when running the command ./phoronix-test-suite start-phoromatic-server it will not prompt to kill the server and continue running.

Running Locally

I have run this in both Docker Desktop and Podman. With the Docker Desktop's licensing changes, I installed Podman on WSL2 and am now doing my local tests using Podman. Included are both instructions.

# Navigate to this directory and build the image
docker build -t phoromatic .

# Create a volume
docker volume create phoromatic

# Run locally using the -u argument to specify a random user
# Here I randomly assigned a user
docker run --name phoromatic -d -p 8089:8089 -p 8088:8088 -u 920202 -v phoromatic:/var/lib/phoronix-test-suite/phoromatic phoromatic:latest

For Podman I ran the following in Rootless Podman:

# Navigate to this directory and build the image
podman build -t phoromatic .

# Create a volume
podman volume create phoromatic

# Run locally and assign a random user
podman run -i -t --name phoromatic -u=12345 -d -p 8089:8089 -p 8088:8088 -v phoromatic:/var/lib/phoronix-test-suite/phoromatic phoromatic:latest

#Check the logs
podman logs phoromatic