Building P2Pool in a Docker Container

Introduction and Scope

This page provides a step-by-step procedure for building and running P2Pool in a Docker container. I happen to use /opt/prod/docker as the directory name on my machine that runs docker. You’ll see that directory name throughout this procedure, it’s arbitrary. You can use any base directory name you want. Just be consistent! :)

The table below shows the build and deployment directory structure that I used.

Host	Directory	Description
Docker host	`/opt/prod/docker/p2pool/src`	The P2Poool source code is installed here
Container	`/opt/p2pool/src`	The P2Poool source code is installed here
Docker host	`/opt/prod/docker/utils`	Scripts to help configure the container environment
Container	`/opt/utils`	Scripts to help configure the container environment
Docker host	`/opt/prod/docker/scriopts	Scripts to start docker containers

When a container is started, the -v docker_host_dir:container_dir switch is used to map the P2Pool source code and the P2Pool runtime binaries from the Docker host to the Docker container. So the Docker runtime containers will have read/write acccess to that directory.

Pre-Requisites

This procedure assumes you have the Docker software up and running and that you are able to create, start, stop and remove containers.

Create the directory structure shown below

mkdir -p /opt/prod/docker
mkdir -p /opt/prod/docker/scripts

Download the Alpine:Linux Docker image

On the Docker host machine:

sudo docker pull debian:latest

Download the P2Pool Source Code from GitHub

As the root user on the Docker host machine.

cd /opt/prod/docker
git clone --recursive git@github.com:SChernykh/p2pool

You should see output like this:

Cloning into 'p2pool'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 10701, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (70/70), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (54/54), done.
remote: Total 10701 (delta 19), reused 47 (delta 14), pack-reused 10631 (from 1)
Receiving objects: 100% (10701/10701), 230.49 MiB | 5.17 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (6776/6776), done.

-Except there will be a LOT more, because of all the third party software that the P2Pool software requires to build correctly.

Once that step is done rename the newly created p2pool directory to src to reflect the fact that it contains P2Pool source code, not runtime P2Pool binaries.

mv /opt/prod/docker/p2pool /opt/prod/docker/src

Create a p2pool directory to hold the P2Pool source code.

mkdir /opt/prod/docker/p2pool

Move the P2Pool source code into the new directory:

mv /opt/prod/docker/src /opt/prod/docker/p2pool

Create a Shell Script to start the P2Pool Dev Container

As the root user, create a shell script called start-p2pool-dev.sh in the /opt/prod/docker/scripts directory. The contents is shown below:

#!/bin/bash
docker run \
	-rm \
	-di \
	--name="p2pooldev" \
        --hostname="p2pooldev" \
        --domainname="osoyalce.com" \
	-v /opt/prod/docker/p2pool:/opt/p2pool \
	-v /opt/prod/docker/utils:/opt/utils \
	debian:latest

Mark the script you just created as executible:

sudo chmod 0755 /opt/prod/docker/scripts/start-p2pooldev.sh

Start the Container

Execute the command below, as the root user on the Docker host:

/opt/prod/docker/scripts/start-p2pooldev.sh

Get a Root Shell in the Container

You can connect to the running container and open a shell by referencing it’s name (as set by the --name switch of the docker run... command).

sudo docker exec -it p2pooldev /bin/bash

Software Pre-Requisites for Compiling P2Pool

Get a root shell inside the Docker Container for this step.

You’ll need to install additional software to build the P2Pool software. Get an root shell (see previous section on how to do this) within the container and use the apt command to install the required software:

sudo apt update
sudp apt -y install vim cmake make gcc g++ build-essential libuv1-dev \
  libzmq3-dev libsodium-dev libpgm-dev libnorm-dev libgss-dev \
  libcurl4-openssl-dev libidn2-0-dev

Create the P2Pool Software Build Environment

As the root user, from within the Docker Container environment (not on the Docker host):

cd /opt/p2pool/src
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Compile and Link the P2Pool Software

As the root user, from within the Docker Container environment:

cd /opt/p2pool/src/build
make

If you have a multi-core machine, you can speed up the compilation process by allocating more threads to the compile using the -j switch. The example below shows the same compile command, but includes -j4 to make the compile use 4 threads whenever possible.

cd /opt/p2pool/src/build
make -j4

make ```

Nadim-Daniel Ghaznavi