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Microservice: Firefox Web Browser

The following section describes how to integrate a containerized Firefox web browser. These instructions assume an existing ECI installation and familiarity with building Docker containers.

Building: Firefox Container

The following section is applicable to:

The following steps detail how to build a Docker image which contains a Firefox web browser.

1. If not already completed, follow section Prepare the Build System for Microservices to prepare the build system.

2. Open a terminal on the build system and navigate to the extracted Dockerfiles directory. The contents of this directory should be as follows:

   $ ls
   application-containers  bpf  display-containers  softplc-containers
   

3. Navigate to the application-containers directory. The contents of this directory should be as follows:

   $ ls
   ec-protocol-bridge  tsn-vnet-txtime-assisted  web-browser
   

4. Navigate to the web-browser directory. The contents of this directory should be as follows:

   $ ls
   Dockerfile  README.md  start.sh
   

5. Build the Firefox web browser container by performing the following command:

   $ docker build -t web-browser-firefox:v1.5 .
   

   Note

   The “.” at the end of the command is intentional.

6. Save the Docker image as a tar archive by performing the following command:

   $ docker save -o web-browser-firefox.tar web-browser-firefox:v1.5
   

   After the save has completed successfully, there will be a tarballed Docker image:

   Docker Image archive name	Description of Docker Image
   web-browser-firefox.tar	Docker image which contains a Firefox web browser.

Executing: Firefox Container

The following section is applicable to:

1. Ensure that the Docker daemon is active. Run the following command to restart the Docker daemon.

   Warning

   All running Docker containers will also restart.

   $ systemctl restart docker
   

   The status of the Docker daemon can be verified with the following command:

   $ systemctl status docker
   

2. Copy the Docker image created earlier to the target system.

3. Load the copied Docker image by performing the following command:

   $ docker load < web-browser-firefox.tar
   

4. Check which Docker images are present on the target system with the following command:

   $ docker images
   

   The Firefox web browser image that was loaded should be present in the list. Note the name and tag of the image for use in the following steps.

   For example, on our system the output is as follows:

   $ docker images
   REPOSITORY            TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
   web-browser-firefox   v1.5                ea58e13f6cd4        7 seconds ago       660MB
   

5. It is a precondition that the display server container display-server-xorg runs before starting this one, otherwise the web browser application cannot start. The web browser will communicate with the display server through a file socket under /tmp, this is why /tmp is mounted into this container with -v /tmp:/tmp.

   --device /dev/dri allows access to the GPU through the DRI interface as Linux device.

   Run the container by performing the following command:

   $ docker run -d --rm \
     --name web-browser \
     --device /dev/dri \
     -v /tmp:/tmp \
     web-browser
   

   Per default the web browser opens a blank window. A specific URL can be opened automatically at startup by calling docker run with the extra parameter -e URL=<URL>. For example, to display the visualizer provided by a CODESYS workload running locally, use: -e URL=http://localhost:8080.