Tag Archives: docker

GitHub Codespaces and online development

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In our previous posting, we discussed using VSCode’s Dev Container extension to allow running workspaces directly within a Docker container.

In December 2020, I was granted early access to a new feature developed by GitHub called Codespaces. Codespaces offers an online VSCode development environment, enabling you to develop entirely in the cloud.

The great news is that Codespaces uses the same core process, and file structure, as Dev Containers; meaning once we have our .devcontainer folder setup (if you are unfamiliar with […]

Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, General, Industry Analysis, Testing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker: moving software development forward

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Long term readers of this blog will know our devotion to using container-based technology, especially Docker, to significantly improve software quality through repeatable builds.

In the Autumn/fall of 2020, Microsoft introduced a Visual Studio Code (VSCode) extension Remote – Containers. With one quick stroke, this extension allows you to open a VSCode project within a Docker container.

Getting started with Dev Containers and Docker

There are several different approaches to using Dev Containers. In this post, we shall cover three options:

Using an existing […]

Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, Testing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Running the eclipse-mosquitto MQTT Broker in a docker container

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

I first wrote about MQTT and IoT back in 2012, when I developed a simple C based library to publish and subscribe Quality of Service (QoS) level 0 MQTT messages.

Subsequently, MQTT has grown to be one of the most widely used IoT connectivity protocols with direct support from service such as AWS. Back in 2010, the first open-source MQTT Broker was Mosquitto. Mosquitto is now part of the Eclipse Foundation, and an iot.eclipse.org project, sponsored by cedalo.com.

Another area that has […]

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 5 Multi-Stage Builds

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Following on from the previous post, where we spent time reducing the docker image size, in this post I’d like to cover a couple of useful practices to further improve our docker image:

Copying local files rather than pulling from the web
Simplifying builds using a multi-stage build

Copying in Local Files

So far, when installing the GCC-Arm compiler, we have pulled it from the web using wget. This technique can suffer from two issues:

Web links are notoriously fragile
https adds complexity to the packages […]

Posted in Agile, ARM, C/C++ Programming, Testing | Tagged , | 5 Comments

An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 4 Reducing Docker Image Size

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In Part 3  we managed to build a Docker image containing the tools required to compile and link C/C++ code destined for our embedded Arm target system. However, we’ve paid little attention to the size of the image. Doing a quick Docker image listing we can see its grown to a whopping 2.14GB:

$ docker image ls
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID […]

Posted in Agile, ARM, C/C++ Programming, Cortex, Testing | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 3 Cross-Compiling for Cortex-M

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In the previous posting we looked at defining a custom Dockerfile where we can add specific tools (and their dependencies). From that we created a Docker image and this allowed us to build C/C++ code in a Docker container, ensuring a consistent build environment.

So far we have to build all our code using the native GCC toolchain which is part of the base Docker image (gcc:7.2). However, I want to be able to build an image I can download and run […]

Posted in Agile, ARM, C/C++ Programming, Cortex, Testing | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 2 Building Images

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In the initial post, we covered the basics of getting Docker setup and using an official base image for compilation.
But let’s suppose the base image doesn’t include all the facilities our company uses for development. For example, we have migrated from make files to CMake, but more lately we have taken to using the python-based Scons build system for C/C++ projects.
The official gcc base image supports make but not Scons or CMake. As before, we can search for a Scons docker […]

Posted in Agile, General | Tagged , | 5 Comments