How to use docker containers with Bacalhau
Bacalhau executes jobs by running them within containers. Bacalhau employs a syntax closely resembling Docker, allowing you to utilize the same containers. The key distinction lies in how input and output data are transmitted to the container via IPFS, enabling scalability on a global level.
This section describes how to migrate a workload based on a Docker container into a format that will work with the Bacalhau client.
You can check out this example tutorial on how to work with custom containers in Bacalhau to see how we used all these steps together.
Here are few things to note before getting started:
Container Registry: Ensure that the container is published to a public container registry that is accessible from the Bacalhau network.
Architecture Compatibility: Bacalhau supports only images that match the host node's architecture. Typically, most nodes run on linux/amd64, so containers in arm64 format are not able to run.
Input Flags: The --input ipfs://... flag supports only directories and does not support CID subpaths. The --input https://... flag supports only single files and does not support URL directories. The --input s3://... flag supports S3 keys and prefixes. For example, s3://bucket/logs-2023-04* includes all logs for April 2023.
You can check to see a list of example public containers used by the Bacalhau team
Note: Only about a third of examples have their containers here. The rest are under random docker hub registries.
To help provide a safe, secure network for all users, we add the following runtime restrictions:
Limited Ingress/Egress Networking:
All ingress/egress networking is limited as described in the networking documentation. You won't be able to pull data/code/weights/ etc. from an external source.
Data Passing with Docker Volumes:
A job includes the concept of input and output volumes, and the Docker executor implements support for these. This means you can specify your CIDs, URLs, and/or S3 objects as input paths and also write results to an output volume. This can be seen in the following example:
The above example demonstrates an input volume flag -i s3://mybucket/logs-2023-04*, which mounts all S3 objects in bucket mybucket with logs-2023-04 prefix within the docker container at location /input (root).
Output volumes are mounted to the Docker container at the location specified. In the example above, any content written to /output_folder will be made available within the apples folder in the job results CID.
Once the job has run on the executor, the contents of stdout and stderr will be added to any named output volumes the job has used (in this case apples), and all those entities will be packaged into the results folder which is then published to a remote location by the publisher.
If you need to pass data into your container you will do this through a Docker volume. You'll need to modify your code to read from a local directory.
We make the assumption that you are reading from a directory called /inputs, which is set as the default.
You can specify which directory the data is written to with the --input CLI flag.
If you need to return data from your container you will do this through a Docker volume. You'll need to modify your code to write to a local directory.
We make the assumption that you are writing to a directory called /outputs, which is set as the default.
You can specify which directory the data is written to with the --output-volumes CLI flag.
At this step, you create (or update) a Docker image that Bacalhau will use to perform your task. You build your image from your code and dependencies, then push it to a public registry so that Bacalhau can access it. This is necessary for other Bacalhau nodes to run your container and execute the given task.
Most Bacalhau nodes are of an x86_64 architecture, therefore containers should be built for x86_64 systems.
For example:
To test your docker image locally, you'll need to execute the following command, changing the environment variables as necessary:
Let's see what each command will be used for:
Bacalhau will use the default ENTRYPOINT if your image contains one. If you need to specify another entrypoint, use the --entrypoint flag to bacalhau docker run.
For example:
The result of the commands' execution is shown below:
Data is identified by its content identifier (CID) and can be accessed by anyone who knows the CID. You can use either of these methods to upload your data:
Copy data from a URL to public storage
Copy Data from S3 Bucket to public storage
You can mount your data anywhere on your machine, and Bacalhau will be able to run against that data
To launch your workload in a Docker container, using the specified image and working with input data specified via IPFS CID, run the following command:
To check the status of your job, run the following command:
To get more information on your job,run:
To download your job, run:
For example, running:
outputs:
The --input flag does not support CID subpaths for ipfs:// content.
Alternatively, you can run your workload with a publicly accessible http(s) URL, which will download the data temporarily into your public storage:
The --input flag does not support URL directories.
If you run into this compute error while running your docker image
This can often be resolved by re-tagging your docker image
If you have questions or need support or guidance, please reach out to the Bacalhau team via Slack (#general channel)
How to use the Bacalhau Docker image
This documentation explains how to use the Bacalhau Docker image to run tasks and manage them using the Bacalhau client.
To get started, you need to install the Bacalhau client (see more information ) and Docker.
The first step is to pull the Bacalhau Docker image from the .
Expected output:
You can also pull a specific version of the image, e.g.:
Remember that the "latest" tag is just a string. It doesn't refer to the latest version of the Bacalhau client, it refers to an image that has the "latest" tag. Therefore, if your machine has already downloaded the "latest" image, it won't download it again. To force a download, you can use the --no-cache flag.
To check the version of the Bacalhau client, run:
Expected Output:
In the example below, an Ubuntu-based job runs to print the message 'Hello from Docker Bacalhau':
ghcr.io/bacalhau-project/bacalhau:latest : Name of the Bacalhau Docker image
--id-only: Output only the job id
--wait: Wait for the job to finish
ubuntu:latest. Ubuntu container
--: Separate Bacalhau parameters from the command to be executed inside the container
sh -c 'uname -a && echo "Hello from Docker Bacalhau!"': The command executed inside the container
Let's have a look at the command execution in the terminal:
The output you're seeing is in two parts: The first line: 13:53:46.478 | INF pkg/repo/fs.go:81 > Initializing repo at '/root/.bacalhau' for environment 'production' is an informational message indicating the initialization of a repository at the specified directory ('/root/.bacalhau') for the production environment. The second line: ab95a5cc-e6b7-40f1-957d-596b02251a66 is a job ID, which represents the result of executing a command inside a Docker container. It can be used to obtain additional information about the executed job or to access the job's results. We store that in an environment variable so that we can reuse it later on (env: JOB_ID=ab95a5cc-e6b7-40f1-957d-596b02251a66)
To print out the content of the Job ID, run the following command:
Expected Output:
One inconvenience that you'll see is that you'll need to mount directories into the container to access files. This is because the container is running in a separate environment from your host machine. Let's take a look at the example below:
The first part of the example should look familiar, except for the Docker commands.
When a job is submitted, Bacalhau prints out the related job_id (a46a9aa9-63ef-486a-a2f8-6457d7bafd2e):
Job status: You can check the status of the job using bacalhau job list.
When it says Completed, that means the job is done, and we can get the results.
Job information: You can find out more information about your job by using bacalhau job describe.
Job download: You can download your job results directly by using bacalhau job get. Alternatively, you can choose to create a directory to store your results. In the command below, we created a directory and downloaded our job output to be stored in the result directory.
After the download has finished, you should see the following contents in the results directory.
Bacalhau supports running programs that are compiled to . With the Bacalhau client, you can upload Wasm programs, retrieve data from public storage, read and write data, receive program arguments, and access environment variables.
Supported WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) Bacalhau can run compiled Wasm programs that expect the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) Snapshot 1. Through this interface, WebAssembly programs can access data, environment variables, and program arguments.
Networking Restrictions All ingress/egress networking is disabled; you won't be able to pull data/code/weights etc. from an external source. Wasm jobs can say what data they need using URLs or CIDs (Content IDentifier) and can then access the data by reading from the filesystem.
Single-Threading There is no multi-threading as WASI does not expose any interface for it.
If your program typically involves reading from and writing to network endpoints, follow these steps to adapt it for Bacalhau:
Replace Network Operations: Instead of making HTTP requests to external servers (e.g., example.com), modify your program to read data from the local filesystem.
Input Data Handling: Specify the input data location in Bacalhau using the --input flag when running the job. For instance, if your program used to fetch data from example.com, read from the /inputs folder locally, and provide the URL as input when executing the Bacalhau job. For example, --input http://example.com.
Output Handling: Adjust your program to output results to standard output (stdout) or standard error (stderr) pipes. Alternatively, you can write results to the filesystem, typically into an output mount. In the case of Wasm jobs, a default folder at /outputs is available, ensuring that data written there will persist after the job concludes.
By making these adjustments, you can effectively transition your program to operate within the Bacalhau environment, utilizing filesystem operations instead of traditional network interactions.
You can specify additional or different output mounts using the -o flag.
You will need to compile your program to WebAssembly that expects WASI. Check the instructions for your compiler to see how to do this.
Data is identified by its content identifier (CID) and can be accessed by anyone who knows the CID. You can use either of these methods to upload your data:
You can mount your data anywhere on your machine, and Bacalhau will be able to run against that data
You can run a WebAssembly program on Bacalhau using the bacalhau wasm run command.
Run Locally Compiled Program:
If your program is locally compiled, specify it as an argument. For instance, running the following command will upload and execute the main.wasm program:
The program you specify will be uploaded to a Bacalhau storage node and will be publicly available if you are using the public demo network.
Alternative Program Specification:
You can use a Content IDentifier (CID) for a specific WebAssembly program.
Input Data Specification:
Make sure to specify any input data using --input flag.
This ensures the necessary data is available for the program's execution.
You can give the Wasm program arguments by specifying them after the program path or CID. If the Wasm program is already compiled and located in the current directory, you can run it by adding arguments after the file name:
For a specific WebAssembly program, run:
Write your program to use program arguments to specify input and output paths. This makes your program more flexible in handling different configurations of input and output volumes.
For example, instead of hard-coding your program to read from /inputs/data.txt, accept a program argument that should contain the path and then specify the path as an argument to bacalhau wasm run:
Your language of choice should contain a standard way of reading program arguments that will work with WASI.
You can also specify environment variables using the -e flag.
Bacalhau operates by executing jobs within containers. This example shows you how to build and use a custom docker container.
To get started, you need to install the Bacalhau client, see more information
This example requires Docker. If you don't have Docker installed, you can install it from . Docker commands will not work on hosted notebooks like Google Colab, but the Bacalhau commands will.
You're likely familiar with executing Docker commands to start a container:
This command runs a container from the docker/whalesay image. The container executes the cowsay sup old fashioned container run command:
This command also runs a container from the docker/whalesay image, using Bacalhau. We use the bacalhau docker run command to start a job in a Docker container. It contains additional flags such as --wait to wait for job completion and --id-only to return only the job identifier. Inside the container, the bash -c 'cowsay hello web3 uber-run' command is executed.
When a job is submitted, Bacalhau prints out the related job_id. We store that in an environment variable so that we can reuse it later on.
You can download your job results directly by using bacalhau job get. Alternatively, you can choose to create a directory to store your results. In the command below, we created a directory (results) and downloaded our job output to be stored in that directory.
Viewing your job output
Both commands execute cowsay in the docker/whalesay container, but Bacalhau provides additional features for working with jobs at scale.
Bacalhau uses a syntax that is similar to Docker, and you can use the same containers. The main difference is that input and output data is passed to the container via IPFS, to enable planetary scale. In the example above, it doesn't make too much difference except that we need to download the stdout.
The --wait flag tells Bacalhau to wait for the job to finish before returning. This is useful in interactive sessions like this, but you would normally allow jobs to complete in the background and use the bacalhau job list command to check on their status.
Another difference is that by default Bacalhau overwrites the default entry point for the container, so you have to pass all shell commands as arguments to the run command after the -- flag.
To use your own custom container, you must publish the container to a container registry that is accessible from the Bacalhau network. At this time, only public container registries are supported.
To demonstrate this, you will develop and build a simple custom container that comes from an old Docker example. I remember seeing cowsay at a Docker conference about a decade ago. I think it's about time we brought it back to life and distribute it across the Bacalhau network.
Next, the Dockerfile adds the script and sets the entry point.
Now let's build and test the container locally.
Once your container is working as expected then you should push it to a public container registry. In this example, I'm pushing to Github's container registry, but we'll skip the step below because you probably don't have permission. Remember that the Bacalhau nodes expect your container to have a linux/amd64 architecture.
Now we're ready to submit a Bacalhau job using your custom container. This code runs a job, downloads the results, and prints the stdout.
The bacalhau docker run command strips the default entry point, so don't forget to run your entry point in the command line arguments.
When a job is submitted, Bacalhau prints out the related job_id. We store that in an environment variable so that we can reuse it later on.
Download your job results directly by using bacalhau job get command.
View your job output
If have questions or need support or guidance, please reach out to the (#general channel).
For example, Rust users can specify the wasm32-wasi target to rustup and cargo to get programs compiled for WASI WebAssembly. See for more information on this.
Consider creating .
See for a workload that leverages WebAssembly support.
If you have questions or need support or guidance, please reach out to the (#general channel)
If you have questions or need support or guidance, please reach out to the (#general channel).