Mendeley in a docker container!

OK, but why??? Why would you wanna run Mendeley in a docker container. Well… I don’t know about you, but for the past 2 months using Mendeley in arch-linux was a nightmare. Some comments from aur:

This package crash whenever tried to open a pdf file […]

What if I downgrade Qt, will it help?

So I decided to end this for good and run Mendely in a docker container!

Running the container

To run Mendeley in docker with GUI support, you need to have a NVIDIA graphics card and use nvidia-docker . This is currently the only caveat!

To setup NVIDIA docker v1, follow these steps.

Clone github repo

First lets’ clone our github repo that contains a collection of docker-gui-apps:

git clone git@github.com:turlucode/docker-gui-apps.git

Build the container

Go into the cloned repo and just run:

make mendeley_nvidia

The new image is going to have the name turlucode/mendeley-nvidia .

Run the container

nvidia-docker run --rm -it --privileged --net=host --ipc=host \
-v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
-v $HOME/.Xauthority:/home/$(id -un)/.Xauthority -e XAUTHORITY=/home/$(id -un)/.Xauthority \
-v $HOME/.config:/home/$(id -un)/.config \
-v $HOME/.local/share/data:/home/$(id -un)/.local/share/data \
turlucode/mendeley-nvidia

Persistent data

To make you data persistent you need to mount

• .config your typical folder where usually apps save their config – located at your home folder
• local/share/data again a folder in your home, where apps store app-data

You can add those in your docker run command as illustrated in the example above.

Your are done! Enjoy!