Running Chrome in a container

I thought this wasn’t gonna be possible because MacOS, but it blew my mind when it worked so, blogpost. I found this Dockerfile from Jess Frazelle’s amazing repo that contains dockerfiles for a bunch of stuff.

Steps

1. Ensure you have xhost running.

   XQuartz is a tool that allows you give access to your screen over a network. You can follow the instructions here to install XQuartz so you can do that.

2. Get your machine IP.

   For this, you can run IP=$(ifconfig en0 | grep inet | awk '$1=="inet" {print $2}') and then echo $IP. I added it to the .sh file straight so doing this would be just to be sure.

3. Add machine IP to xhost access.

   Simply run xhost + $IP to do this.

4. Download chrome.json file

   You need the chrome.json file in your home directory, so run

    cd $HOME && curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jfrazelle/dotfiles/master/etc/docker/seccomp/chrome.json -O ~/chrome.json 
   

   You can use wget too but I don’t have that installed.

5. Create run.sh file to run the build.

   I had to remove the /dev/snd and all other dev stuff (which would’ve provided access to the machine’s sound etc) because MacOS doesn’t allow you access to the hardware from shell, but you should be fine if you’re on Ubuntu or something similar.

    IP=$(ifconfig en0 | grep inet | awk '$1=="inet" {print $2}')
    DISPLAY=$IP:0
    docker run -it \
        --net host \
        --cpuset-cpus 0 \
        --memory 512mb \
        -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
        -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
        -v $HOME/Downloads:/home/chrome/Downloads \
        -v $HOME/.config/google-chrome/:/data \
        --security-opt seccomp=$HOME/chrome.json \
        -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm \
        --name chrome \
        jess/chrome:beta
   

6. Run the script.

You might see a bunch of errors like these, but they won’t stop Chrome from popping up like a hungry friend when you’re cooking.

If you get this to work too, feel free to shoutout. Shoutout to Jess also for her Dockerfiles repo.

Shalom.