Common Lisp Docker Images for Development

Github: https://github.com/daewok/lisp-devel-docker

Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/daewok/lisp-devel/

See also: slime-docker

About

Common Lisp is a great language, but it can be a bit of a pain to get started with it, particularly if you are running Windows or OSX. And if you do get your favorite implementation installed and working, you then have to deal with installing foreign libraries to get your favorite packages from Quicklisp working. This project attempts to make the whole setup process easier, letting users get right into coding, by providing a series of Docker images.

These images are sufficient for a newbie to get coding and also form a good starting point for teams of Common Lisp developers that need to work in the exact same environment.

These images are not meant for packaging Common Lisp code for deployment. They are very heavy weight from their "batteries included" approach. Look for extensible, lightweight deployment images to be developed in the near future.

Images

There are three tags defined in this repository, base, ql, and latest. ql and latest are the same image, built off base. There may be more tags defined in the future for versioning (i.e., monthly versions when a new Quicklisp release comes out).

Base Image

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This image is based off Debian Jessie. It contains only the bare necessities needed to run four Common Lisp implementations:

• SCBL
• CCL
• ECL
• ABCL

Additionally, a Linux user (and group) is created with UID 1000 and name lisp. It is recommended that you use this user when running one of these images.

ASDF Integration

ASDF user translations have been modified to not use the user's home directory. This is primarily in case you decide to run the image as a user that does not exist in the image (e.g., your UID on your machine is 1002 and you want to make sure that mounted folders are writeable by the container user). Instead, ASDF uses /var/cache/common-lisp/${ASDF_DOCKER_OUTPUT_SUBDIR}/${IMPLEMENTATION}/ for its build cache. The implementation is auto detected, but the subdir can be controlled by the user by specifying ASDF_DOCKER_OUTPUT_SUBDIR as an environment variable when running the image.

Additionally, /usr/local/share/common-lisp/slime/ is added to ASDF's source registry, to allow for easy mounting of Slime/Swank

Usage

To get started experimenting with SBCL, you can run the following:

docker run --rm -it daewok/lisp-devel:base sbcl

But, it's pretty common that you'll want to actually, you know, work on code that isn't lost when the container goes down! To do that, simply mount your folder containing your code like so:

docker run --rm -it -v /path/to/local/code:/usr/local/share/common-lisp/source daewok/lisp-devel:base sbcl

Your code will even be discoverable by ASDF!

QL Image

OK, enough with the bare bones, how about an image you can do something with. The ql and latest tags point to an image that has Quicklisp installed, along with the foreign libraries necessary to compile every library currently in Quicklisp. As such, it is much larger than the base image.

Quicklisp is installed to the path /usr/local/share/common-lisp/quicklisp which is owned by lisp:lisp.

This image behaves exactly the same as the base image, except that it loads Quicklisp on start, so simply run:

docker run --rm -it daewok/lisp-devel:latest sbcl

and start playing with Quicklisp!

Notes and Gotchas

• Lisp is more fun when you're using Emacs and Slime to interact with it! See slime-docker for information on a library that makes setting that up easy!

• Please open an issue if you find a package in Quicklisp that is missing a dependency in the ql image.

• If you do not use the lisp or root users when using the Quicklisp image, you will have issues with Quicklisp being loaded because other users do not have init files that load Quicklisp's setup.lisp. You will need to either Quicklisp explicitly or create a new user (the init files are placed in /etc/skel so new users will have them by default). Additionally, make sure the new user is in the lisp group (to access the Quicklisp folder).

• SBCL does its best to turn off Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) when it starts. However, Docker's default security profile (if seccomp is compiled in) prevents SBCL from doing this. If you are afraid this might be an issue (I haven't personally seen an issue yet, but it was definitely done for a reason) or you're just tired of seeing:

WARNING:

Couldn't re-execute SBCL with proper personality flags (/proc isn't mounted? setuid?)

Trying to continue anyway.

whenever you start SBCL, you can either use a more lax seccomp profile by adding --security-opt=seccomp=/path/to/docker-sbcl-seccomp.json to the run command (docker-sbcl-seccomp.json is found in the project's git repo). Or you can disable seccomp altogether (not recommended!) by adding --security-opt=seccomp=unconfined. I will make a good faith effort to keep docker-sbcl-seccomp.json up to date with Docker's defaults, but no guarantees are provided!