Building and running WSJT-X in a Docker container

Having had some compatibility problems with the pre-built binaries of the weak signal communications software WSJT-X I wanted to build it from source. But since it has a lot of exotic dependencies and also needs a Fortran compiler, I didn’t want to clutter my (linux) system with these. The solution was to build and run WSJT-X in a Docker container.

I found “Running WSJTX in a docker container” by Aaron Brown but the Dockerfile is a bit outdated and so I had to update it to reflect the current state of the WSJT-X development, as of version 2.7.0. The new one can now be found here. (Or here running as root user – not recommended.)

Having this Dockerfile in the working directory and assuming Docker is already installed on the system (typically by sudo apt install docker.io ) and the normal user is in the Docker group ( sudo usermod -aG docker $USER ), the container image can now be built with:

docker build --pull -t wsjtx .

This will download everything necessary and build WSJT-X in a stripped down Ubuntu system.

In order to enable use of X11 for the container I had to first run:

xhost +

Now, running WSJT-X is done by:

docker run --privileged -v ~/.local/share:/home/user/.local/share -v ~/.config:/home/user/.config -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY wsjtx /wsjtx/output/bin/wsjtx

This runs WSJT-X in Docker as uid=1000 which is the first non-root user. It gives the container access to the locations where WSJT-X stores configuration and saved data. It also runs the container in privileged mode meaning that it has access to all the devices, like sound and comm-ports. This is often not recommended but should be ok if the docker command is not ran as root/sudo. The proper way to do it would otherwise be to forward only the necessary devices by –device /dev/snd etc.

Placing the xhost and docker run commands in a shell script file is perhaps the easiest way to run the program many times.