Running ROS and its gui tools through a docker image

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(Strictly speaking, this is not an answer, but I needed more characters than the comment allowed)

For students, I would take a look at Singularity.

It uses the same techniques, but doesn't require super user rights, mounts $HOME by default, runs everything as the $USER that started the container, and allows access to devices and GPUs by default.

There isn't even any special configuration needed with Singularity containers to be able to use GUIs.

And it allows you to import/run/exec Docker images, so you can start from osrf/ros:kinetic-desktop-full for instance.

Edit: as an answer to your original question: yes, it's certainly possible to run GUI applications from inside Docker containers. Some of the approaches are documented over at wiki/docker. An alternative can be seen at osrf/car_demo.

Edit2: here's a three line example to get RViz running from inside a Singularity "shell" (essentially equivalent to a docker run -it ..):

# needed once: converts Docker image into Singularity image on your local system
singularity pull --name ros-kinetic-desktop-full.simg docker://osrf/ros:kinetic-desktop-full

# in terminal 1: roscore
singularity exec -p ./ros-kinetic-desktop-full.simg bash -c 'source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash; roscore'

# in terminal 2: rviz

# if you have nvidia hw and the proprietary driver installed:
singularity exec --nv -p ./ros-kinetic-desktop-full.simg bash -c 'source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash; rviz'

# if you have a built-in Intel GPU or are using nouveau
singularity exec -p ./ros-kinetic-desktop-full.simg bash -c 'source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash; rviz'

Note: I'm using Singularity 2.5.2 commands here. Singularity 2.6 (and 3.0) will have changed the way it interacts with NVidia hw.

The -p is to make sure all child processes in the container are terminated when the container terminates.

You might be interested in a small python tool from OSRF named Rocker

A tool to run docker containers with overlays and convenient options for things like GUIs etc.

https://github.com/osrf/rocker

It's basically helpful CLI around Docker that enables display/audio forwarding and hardware acceleration to container to simplify using ROS GUIs with Docker. I'm sure @tfoote would appreciate any feedback should you try out the project.

Edit: Just to throw it out there, you may also want to checkout web based environments for developing ROS, e.g:

• ROS Development Studio
  • http://www.theconstructsim.com
  • https://discourse.ros.org/t/rosject-s...
• AWS RoboMaker
  • https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker
  • https://discourse.ros.org/t/check-out...

However, web based environments may pose their own challenges if your intent is to also interact with physical robots locally in a lab/class room. Still I imagine a combination of the theses methods would do nicely. E.g RDS/AWS for homework and Docker/Singularity for in lab sessions.

I use the latest ros image (e.g., ros:melodic) and install the ROS desktop version (my simple custom Dockerfile for the GUI tools). Then I start all GUI tools with x11docker.

Works like a charm:

$ x11docker --hostnet ros:gui rviz
$ x11docker --hostnet ros:gui rqt_graph

I'm using --hostnet (cf. --network=host) for simplicity. ros:gui is the tag of my custom Docker image.

For those, who are still looking for an easy ROS usage: https://hub.docker.com/r/johannhaselb...

This will allow you to use all ROS GUI tools within your browser - on mac, linux and even windows.