Revisiting getting docker-compose on Raspberry Pi (ARM) the easy way

Whale

Two years ago I was publishing a post to build docker-compose on an ARM machine. Nowadays, you can find docker-compose on PyPI. However, if you intent to run docker-compose on a platform without Python dependencies, you might still be interested in my guide which generates an ELF binary executable.

My previous guide has worked well until release 1.22.0 after which the Dockerfile.armhf (which was merged) has been upgraded to match the changes for the X86-64 platform but broke my build instructions. The builds seems to work and generate an executable but it fails to run due to missing dependencies:

+ dist/docker-compose-Linux-armv7l version
[446] Failed to execute script docker-compose
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "bin/docker-compose", line 5, in
from compose.cli.main import main
File "/code/.tox/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/PyInstaller/loader/pyimod03_importers.py", line 627, in exec_module
exec(bytecode, module.dict)
File "compose/cli/main.py", line 13, in
from distutils.spawn import find_executable
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

I have not found the root-cause of the problem as I am not familiar with tox, but it looks like a configuration problem of that tool. So I decided to simply use Python3 built-in virtualenv.

As in my previous guide, you need to clone the repository and choose a branch. You can take the release branch or a specific version branch (e.g. bump-1.23.2).

$ git clone https://github.com/docker/compose.git
$ cd compose
$ git checkout bump-1.23.2

The two next shell commands should modify the original build script to use virtualenv and to add the missing dependencies (which are correctly installed in the tox environment but would be missing in ours).

$ sed -i -e 's:^VENV=/code/.tox/py36:VENV=/code/.venv; python3 -m venv $VENV:' script/build/linux-entrypoint
$ sed -i -e '/requirements-build.txt/ i $VENV/bin/pip install -q -r requirements.txt' script/build/linux-entrypoint

Now you can follow the exact same steps as in the previous guide. In summary:

$ docker build -t docker-compose:armhf -f Dockerfile.armhf .
$ docker run --rm --entrypoint="script/build/linux-entrypoint" -v $(pwd)/dist:/code/dist -v $(pwd)/.git:/code/.git "docker-compose:armhf"
$ sudo cp dist/docker-compose-Linux-armv7l /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
$ sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
$ sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
$ docker-compose version
docker-compose version 1.23.2, build 1110ad01
docker-py version: 3.6.0
CPython version: 3.6.8
OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.1.0j 20 Nov 2018

6 Replies to “Revisiting getting docker-compose on Raspberry Pi (ARM) the easy way”

  1. Tried with latest branch, but got build error about no distutils. Using bump-1.23.2 worked, though.

    1. Hi Colin and thanks for the feedback.
      I agree, running compose inside a container is also an easy way. But don’t worry to install Python 3.x and 2,7 in parallel as on many Linux distributions this is well supported.

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