How to setup paraview server on docker and connect to it from host machine?

[Karol Lewandowski]

How to setup paraview server on docker and connect to it from host machine?

[Lukasz Kaczmraczyk]

The procedure look like this,

1) Download linux version of paraview form https://www.paraview.org/download/. Version of paraview has to be the same what you have on host machine.

2) Copy installation file form host to docker container, and extract files,

cd /mofem_build
cp $HOSTHOME/Downloads/ParaView-5.4.0-RC3-Qt5-OpenGL2-MPI-Linux-64bit.tar.gz .
tar -xvzf ParaView-5.4.0-RC3-Qt5-OpenGL2-MPI-Linux-64bit.tar.gz

3) The run pvserver in docker container. You can then use docker port to find out what host port the container’s port 22 is mapped to:

docker run -P -d --rm=true --name pvserver --volumes-from mofem_build  mofem_build  /mofem_build/ParaView-5.4.0-RC3-Qt5-OpenGL2-MPI-Linux-64bit/bin/pvserver --server-port=22
docker port pvserver 22

as result you get,

0.0.0.0:32773

where numbers before double dot is IP address of host (0.0.0.0) and after port number (32773).

4) Open preview in your host machine, go to File->Connect, in connect add server, and as a host and port use 0.0.0.0 and 32773 respectively. Next click Configure and save. Select your server and connect to it.

At that point you have access to mofem_build directory in docker container. Note you can run analysis is another container.

This in will work, but is not the best way. We need to compile preview server with mpi and add this to mofem build environment.

[Lukasz Kaczmraczyk]

Couple examples how to compile paraview server with docker are on the web, for example

https://github.com/KazuyaIshida/ParaView_5.1.2_Dockerfile

https://hub.docker.com/r/ishidakazuya/paraview_5.1.2/
https://hub.docker.com/r/ishidakazuya/paraview_5.1.2_mesa-llvm_openssh_key/

If it happens that you using paraview_5.1.2, you can pull those images and run container with 

--volumes-from mofem_build

We can not copy this solutions directly to our building system, this has to be done with ubuntu, examples are for centos.