Installation

Note

Most of the installation steps require high permissions so you will probably need to run them with sudo.

Install the container toolkit

To use the Genv container toolkit, Genv needs be installed first as root using pip with the following command:

sudo pip install genv

Note

This is because the container runtime, which is implemented in Python and imports Genv (i.e. import genv) runs as root.

The container toolkit is part of the Genv project repository.

You will need to clone the project repository. Your home repository is a great place to keep it:

git clone https://github.com/run-ai/genv.git $HOME/genv

Then, you can then see the container toolkit components with the following command:

ls -la $HOME/genv/genv-docker

Register the container runtime

Then, you will need to register the Genv container runtime in the Docker daemon configuration file /etc/docker/daemon.json.

Edit the file manually

You can edit the Docker daemon configuration file /etc/docker/daemon.json manually and add the Genv container runtime under runtimes. You should create the file if it does not exist.

Here is an example of the file:

{
    "runtimes": {
        "genv": {
            "path": "/home/raz/genv/genv-docker/genv-container-runtime.py"
        }
    }
}

Note

You should use full absolute paths and avoid using environment variables like $HOME because the path will be evaluated in a root context.

Then, restart the Docker daemon for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart docker

Pass as argument to dockerd

You can use the dockerd argument --add-runtime instead.

Here is an example:

dockerd --add-runtime genv=$HOME/genv/genv-docker/genv-container-runtime.py

Install the docker wrapper

The best way to run Genv containers is with the docker wrapper genv-docker.

It is recommended to install it in a system-wide location such as /usr/local/bin. You can do this with the following command:

cp -f $HOME/genv/genv-docker/genv-docker.sh /usr/local/bin/genv-docker

Now, you will be able to execute genv-docker commands from any directory.

If you don’t want to install genv-docker in a system-wide location or don’t have sufficient permissions, you can install it at $HOME/.local/bin, or run it using its full path.

Verify installation

You can verify the installation with the following command:

genv-docker run --rm ubuntu env | grep GENV_

You should then see that the environment variable GENV_ENVIRONMENT_ID is set.