Buildozer: Running buildozer in docker

[Tyrn]

I've built the buildozer app according to README

docker build --tag=buildozer .

docker run --volume "$(pwd)":/home/user/hostcwd buildozer --version

I ran this command in my project directory:

$ docker run --volume "$(pwd)":/home/user/hostcwd buildozer android debug

First time it downloaded all the SDKs, built a lot of dependencies and finally successfully built an apk file in pwd/bin, which is an easily expected behavior. I tried to build the same apk again with the same command line, expecting it to be reasonably fast, but it started the process of downloading SDKs again, which I aborted. What is the right way of running buildozer routinely the docker way?

I'm afraid, the README is a bit terse on docker. It'd be nice to tell explicitly where am I supposed to clone the buildozer which I intend to build with docker, where the big .buildozer should go, how to run buildozer correctly every time. Very close for me, but still no cigar. As I am not a docker expert I turned out to be unable to troubleshoot this minor nuisance.

[tshirtman]

Since you didn't rm your container, you can use docker start container_name to run it again, it'll still have everything it downloaded. You can use docker ps -a to ee all existing containers, the last column is their user friendly random name.

If you don't want to reuse containers, add --rm to the run command to automatically remove them, to avoid pile up to eat your disc space. And use more --volume options to save ~/.buildozer outside of the container and reuse it in next runs.

[Tyrn]

I did it like this:

• Build basic image:

$ cd
$ git clone https://github.com/kivy/buildozer
$ cd buildozer
$ docker build --tag=buildozer .
$ docker run --volume "$(pwd)":/home/user/hostcwd buildozer --version

• Create a project:

[pong]$ docker run --volume "$(pwd)":/home/user/hostcwd buildozer init

• Edit buildozer.spec:

android.accept_sdk_license = True

• Build:

[pong]$ docker run --volume "$(pwd)":/home/user/hostcwd buildozer android debug

• Check the containers:

$ docker ps -a

• Commit the container where the successful build happened, like this:

$ docker commit angry_black tyrn/buildozer:propio
$ docker images

The resulting image is about 5GB.

• Run it like this on any project:

$ docker run --volume "$(pwd)":/home/user/hostcwd tyrn/buildozer:propio android debug

Subsequent builds of the same project are fast. When I start yet another project, the first run still takes a lot of time: it builds about 1.2GB of local .buildozer directory from scratch. Is it by design, or is it my incompetence?