Docker development container?
Hi, all! I've been discovering Docker over the last year or so at my new job and learned about an idea called a "Development Container" thru Gitlab. As I understand it, this concept can be used to create a ready-to-use development image that can be loaded up in Docker Desktop. And once it's loaded, all of the tools I've just manually downloaded (I'm starting my SF modding journey today!) could be ready to use. So in other words, new users would only have to download a single Docker image and it would have within a completed installation of Unreal, VS, Audiokinetic, SMM, the basic starter project, any other dependencies we might need, and an automatically mounted persistent volume that links back to a configurable location on the user's host storage. If that's true -- and assuming I've described that accurately -- that seems really useful! And it's not that the process is that difficult, I just thought being able to pull up VS Code right on GitHub was so awesome that I'd love to replicate the expedient experience here.
Sooo... long story short, do we have that available somewhere? And if not, can I help make it? It's a bit beyond my grasp, but I'd love to do what I can to help if that kind of thing would be useful!
(Side note -- I realize there are also questions of if are we allowed to have that kind of thing because of individual software license concerns and external sign-ups I just had to do with Epic, Wwise, Microsoft, etc to download everything the BeginnersGuide just asked me to get. However, I feel like these concerns can be answered with some kind of mTLS handshake between a authorization gate at wherever we post the development container image and the external parties. We could even make write kind of logic that opens a sign-up / login page to any site where the user's request was rejected, e.g. because they weren't already logged in...)
Looking forward to your thoughts, all!
Solution:Jump to solution
the biggest problem with this is that devcontainers are basically always linux images, and it is not currently possible to develop mods from linux. people are working on it though, keep an eye on #Linux mod development?
on windows docker hosts at least, there are significant performance problems with the files being on the host machine storage, as opposed to being cloned in a volume
you may also find this WIP tool interesting...
GitHub
GitHub - satisfactorymodding/SMEI: Satisfactory Modding Environment...
Satisfactory Modding Environment Installer. WIP. Contribute to satisfactorymodding/SMEI development by creating an account on GitHub.
3 Replies
Solution
the biggest problem with this is that devcontainers are basically always linux images, and it is not currently possible to develop mods from linux. people are working on it though, keep an eye on #Linux mod development?
on windows docker hosts at least, there are significant performance problems with the files being on the host machine storage, as opposed to being cloned in a volume
you may also find this WIP tool interesting
https://github.com/satisfactorymodding/SMEI/
GitHub
GitHub - satisfactorymodding/SMEI: Satisfactory Modding Environment...
Satisfactory Modding Environment Installer. WIP. Contribute to satisfactorymodding/SMEI development by creating an account on GitHub.
Neat! I'll have to check that out. Thanks, @Robb (Busy) ! Also, bummer that modding can't run on some kind of light-weight Linux distro. I've seen VS code on Linux, and it looks like Wwise at least supports Linux targets, but no idea if Unreal dev can be done directly on Linux... I take it, it can't?
long story. read #Linux mod development? for the answer