Use this if you want to use a local Docker service to automatically run testbeds for autopkgtest.

Unfortunately autopkgtest doesn't have native support for Docker. But it has a generic SSH "virtualization" driver: Connect to any host over SSH, and run tests there. And it lets you tell that SSH driver to call a custom script to initialize the testbed and provide the SSH configuration to connect to it.

ssh-docker.py in this repository is such a script, and sets up a Docker container as the testbed for you.

Autopkgtest has gained built-in support for Docker and Podman, so this tool is no longer needed. See: autopkgtest-virt-docker

Call autopkgtest as usual with the ssh virt driver, and pass the ssh-docker.py script using the -s option:

autopkgtest my_deb_package/ -- ssh -s autopkgtest-ssh-docker/ssh-docker.py

With this command ssh-docker.py will:

• Build the included Dockerfile.
• Start the resulting image. The init script inside the container runs apt-get update to ensure autopkgtest has fresh repository information.
• Install your local SSH public key into the test user's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.
• Provide the SSH virt driver with the required configuration data.

The container is deleted when autopkgtest cleans up or reverts the testbed, revert then provides a fresh container from the same image.

You can specify additional options for the script after another --, for example:

autopkgtest my_deb_package/ -- ssh -s autopkgtest-ssh-docker/ssh-docker.py -- --image my-buildenv:latest

Available options are:

• --apt-proxy URL: Proxy to use for apt inside the container. If autopkgtest needs to install the same dependencies in many testbed instances a local caching proxy (e.g. apt-cacher-ng) can speed up things a lot.

• --dockerfile DOCKERFILE: Build this Dockerfile and use the image as the testbed. The parent directory of the file is used as the build context for Docker. Use this if the included Dockerfile doesn't suit your needs, e.g. if you need a different distribution, or you want to pre-install additional packages.

• --image IMAGE: If given alone: use the named image instead of building an image. If given with--dockerfile: tag the freshly build image with this tag. This behavior is similar to the image option in a docker-compose.yml file.

You can also run

./ssh-docker.py open -h

to get the list of supported options directly from the script.