Docker instructions

[rpgoldman]

I see that there's a Dockerfile included in the repo, but I'm not sure how it is to be used. It doesn't contain instructions for building any of the VAL executables, so is it intended to be for use by developers instead of users? It looks like it contains the requirements for building VAL, but doesn't actually do the building. Is that right?

Any interest in an image that will contain prebuilt VAL executables for users? I might be able to bash one together.

Also, it looks like the Debian base image should probably be updated to something newer.

It's ok if the answer is "yeah, it's bit-rotted, make of it what you will."

But I'd like to know if there's any objection to take a PR that updates this and provides an image for users, to save myself the trouble of making one that won't be accepted.

[claudius-kienle]

Hi @rpgoldman,

I faced the same problem and developed and published a docker image to run VAL in Docker.

It can be found in https://github.com/claudius-kienle/VAL-Docker.

You can download and run the image with:

docker run claudiusk/val:latest domain.pddl problem.pddl plan.pddl

[rpgoldman]

@claudius-kienle Thank you so much for that pointer. I'm sorry: I should have thanked you earlier. I pulled your docker file and have been using it successfully.

[morganfinemorris]

@claudius-kienle Thank you for providing that docker image; I've had a really hard time getting VAL to work and this helps a lot. Just an FYI, running your Docker on a Mac with an Apple chip gives the error message "WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested" and Docker Desktop puts a caution icon + hover-over warning "Image may have poor performance, or fail, if run by emulation" in the local images overview. I'm not sure if it actually impacts performance since I was still able to run the image, but it did make me worry. I was able to fix the issue myself (by adding the argument --platform=linux/arm64 to the FROM commands on line 3 and 20 of the Dockerfile; I'm not experienced enough with Docker to know if this is best-practice, but it looks the most straight-forward way to 'request a specific platform'), but I thought you might want to know.

[rpgoldman]

docker buildx build --push --platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64 -t <tag> . should create and push both platform images.