RHEL container

This project builds a personal RHEL container image (ie. Docker) for x86-64.

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsed or official Red Hat project. There is no guarantee or support. You are very much on your own using this.

If you want to run RHEL images you are encouraged to check Project Atomic.

Build

Requirements:

• Docker (any moderately recent release should be ok)
• A Red Hat Developers account for building the base RHEL image, or any other RHEL subscription if you have one.

Note: the image you will be building should NOT be published, as it contains a subscription to your account.

Please check the section about build issues should you find any problem with the build process.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Fill in the RHEL_SUB_USER and RHEL_SUB_PASSWD below and run:

$ make [email protected] RHEL_SUB_PASSWD=mypasswd rhel

If you want to build from a RHEL image that is not the latest relase, you will have to change the FROM line in the relevant Dockerfile.

Building under RHEL

Note that Red Hat's version of Docker incorporates patches to allow containers to reuse the host's subscription. If this is the case and you wish to reuse them, invoke the build process with ON_RHEL_HOST=1.

Software Collections Library

A RHEL image with Red Hat Software Collections Library can also be build atop the base RHEL image. Build it with:

$ make [email protected] RHEL_SUB_PASSWD=mypasswd scl

You can add the EPEL repo by specifying EPEL_ENABLE=1 in the command above.

Build issues

Subscription Manager takes a long time to execute and ends up failing

If you have lots of subscriptions the manager can take quite a while to run, and it could be the case you would even see it failing to subscribe and register to your RHSM account. Always keep an eye on your RHSM subscription status, and everything else being ok just try again, as sometimes it will take a few tries to make it work.

Subscription Manager cannot execute inside a container

Unfortunately in some instances the subscription manager will refuse to execute inside a container (most likely due to the Red Hat Docker fork detecting RHSM is being used). If this happens you should create a tarball (.tar.gz) of the contents of /etc/pki/entitlement and /etc/pki/consumer of a successfully subscribed and registered RHEL machine (you can do this with a RHEL ISO image and a VM).

Once you have that tarball, you should place it in any subdirectory of rhel-base and invoke the build process setting the variable ENTITLEMENTS to the relative path from rhel-base to the tarball file. For example, if you placed the tarball entitlements.tar.gz under rhel-base, you'd invoke:

$ make ENTITLEMENTS=./entitlements.tar.gz build

Deleting the image

Keep in mind that your RHEL image will have a subscription. In addition to not sharing the image, removing the subscription is advised before deleting it, since not doing so will keep the registered host/container in RHSM.

You have a convenience target for this task, make implode. This target will remove containers (losing whatever changes you had there) and the image once it removes your subscription.

Note that you might have multiple images deriving from a RHEL base, but you only need to unsubscribe one of the images, since they all have the same subscription.

Running

You can use a convenience target for running a container:

$ make run

This will try to reuse an existing container so that your changes remain. If you want to remove the container, you have other convenience targets such as rm-container, stop-container and kill-container inside each image's directory.

You also have make run-scl for the Software Collections Library image.