Installation For Linux Users

On Linux it is easiest to install the appropriate binaries directly using the following commands.

Figure Out Which Architecture Your Processor Has

The following command will return the machine hardware name. For example, x86_64 indicates that you're running on a AMD 64.

uname -m

We currently only support AMD 64 for Linux. Please let us know if you have a ARM64 processor, so we know that we should increase priority for supporting ARM64 processors for Linux.

Install Polytope CLI Binaries

curl -s https://polytope.com/install.sh | sh -s

Docker

This section is not applicable to Windows users, since they should already have followed the Docker Desktop instructions for Windows. Ensure that docker is installed and up-to-date. Polytope does not support old versions of Docker.

Docker needs to run in rootless mode on Linux. Otherwise files created in mounted directories by code running in containers will be owned by the root user so the user will not have access to the created files.

Rootless Docker on Ubuntu

This assumes that you have Ubuntu version 24+.

Install Prerequisites

sudo apt -y install uidmap

Create an AppArmor Profile for rootlesskit by running the following block of commands.

APPARMOR_FILE="/etc/apparmor.d/home.$USER.bin.rootlesskit"
USER_HOME=$(eval echo ~$USER)

cat <<EOT | sudo tee "$APPARMOR_FILE"
# ref: https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-23-10-restricted-unprivileged-user-namespaces
abi <abi/4.0>,
include <tunables/global>

~/bin/rootlesskit flags=(unconfined) {
  userns,

  # Site-specific additions and overrides. See local/README for details.
  include if exists <local/home.$USER.bin.rootlesskit>
}
EOT

Enable unpriviledeged user namespaces

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns

Install rootless Docker

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/rootless | sh

Add the following lines to ~/.bashrc

export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
export DOCKER_HOST="unix:///run/user/$UID/docker.sock"

Load the ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

Start the rootless Docker daemon

systemctl --user start docker

Test the Docker daemon

docker info
docker run hello-world

Docker Desktop

Installing Docker Desktop is optional for Linux users.