Installing solids4foam with Docker

What is Docker?

Docker is an open source software platform for creating, deploying and managing virtualized application containers. Using docker we can essentialy create a light-weight virtual machine with solids4foam and its dependencies already installed.

How do I Install Docker?

Docker can be installed on Windows, macOS and Linux by following the instructions on the Docker website.

Creating the solids4foam Docker Container

In macOS and Linux, the solids4foam container can be created with (OpenFOAM-v2512 as an example here)

docker run -it --rm 
  -v "${HOME}":/shared \
  solids4foam/solids4foam:v2.3-openfoam-v2512 \
  bash

where -v="${HOME}":/shared means that your host computer home directory is mounted and shared with the container at /shared. The first time this command is executed it will download the solids4foam docker image from Docker Hub. The images for the other OpenFOAM variants are called

solids4foam/solids4foam:v2.3-openfoam-9
solids4foam/solids4foam:v2.3-foam-extend-4.1

All the images available can be found at hub.docker.com/repository/docker/solids4foam.

Using solids4foam Within the Container

Once you have logged into the container, you should load OpenFOAM using the appropriate command the version you downloaded:

source /lib/openfoam/openfoam2512/etc/bashrc            # OpenFOAM-v2512
source /opt/openfoam9/etc/bashrc                        # OpenFOAM-9
source /home/dockeruser/foam/foam-extend-4.1/etc/bashrc # foam-extend-4.1

You can then navigate to the solids4foam tutorials directory with the appropriate command below:

cd /usr/lib/solids4foam/tutorials   # OpenFOAM-v2512
cd /opt/solids4foam/tutorials       # OpenFOAM-9
cd /home/dockeruser/solids4foam     # foam-extend-4.1

Please see the tutorials guide to learn how to run the tutorials.

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Exiting the Docker Container

You can exit a container with

exit

Note that this will stop and remove the container.