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 here) and Docker.
The first step is to pull the Bacalhau Docker image from the Github container registry.
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.
If have questions or need support or guidance, please reach out to the Bacalhau team via Slack (#general channel).