Build and run gnome-shell in a Docker container

[Reto Kaiser <reto retokaiser com>]

Hello

I'm new to gnome, and it took me quite some time to build and run "gnome-shell" with "jhbuild", but I finally made it.

For having a reproducible environment that can be thrown away and recreated if needed, I wanted to build and run everything in a container. My approach works roughly like this:

1. Build a Docker image that has JHBuild and all the system dependencies installed.

2. Compile "gnome-shell" in the container using "jhbuild".

3. Share the X server socket into the container by bind-mounting "/tmp/.X11-unix".

4. Run "gnome-shell" in the container in nested mode, connecting to the host's X server.

The code and detailed instructions can be found here: https://gitlab.com/njam/jhbuild-experiments/tree/master/docker

Since I couldn't find any documentation on how to do this, I thought I'd share it on the mailing list.

I'd be happy to polish it up and integrate it into the wiki if you think it's valuable to have there.

Regards,

 Reto Kaiser