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Foldingathome Foldingathome

Container

Science

Folding@home is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.

Image details

Pulls: 4.8M
Architecture: amd64, arm64
Image size: 139 MB
Latest: 8.5.6
User: linuxserver
Created: Mar 20, 2020
Updated: 5 days ago
Status: active

Configuration

Type
Container
Platform
linux
Image
linuxserver/foldingathome:latest
Ports
80:80/tcp7396:7396/tcp
Volumes
/config : /srv/lsio/foldingathome/config
Env vars
PUID=1000PGID=1000TZ=Etc/UTCACCOUNT_TOKEN=MACHINE_NAME=CLI_ARGS=
Restart
unless-stopped

Template by technorabilia

Notes

Portainer App Templates by Technorabilia, based on data provided by LinuxServer.io.

Ensure to create the following volume directories on the host file system, or modify the paths in the volume mapping section under the advanced options below, as needed.

mkdir -p /srv/lsio/foldingathome/config

Standalone Install

Select an install method, to see config/commands for deploying Foldingathome

Installation method

Install on Portainer

Import all app templates into your Portainer instance, for easy 1-click deploys

  1. Ensure both Docker and Portainer are installed, and up-to-date
  2. Log into your Portainer web UI
  3. Under Settings → App Templates, paste the below URL
  4. Head to Home → App Templates, and the list of apps will show up
  5. Select Foldingathome, fill in any config options, and hit Deploy

Template Import URL

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lissy93/portainer-templates/main/templates.json
Show Me demo

More install options in our documentation.

linuxserver.io
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The LinuxServer.io team brings you another container release featuring:
  • regular and timely application updates
  • easy user mappings (PGID, PUID)
  • custom base image with s6 overlay
  • weekly base OS updates with common layers across the entire LinuxServer.io ecosystem to minimise space usage, down time and bandwidth
  • regular security updates

Find us at:
  • Blog - all the things you can do with our containers including How-To guides, opinions and much more!
  • Discord - realtime support / chat with the community and the team.
  • Discourse - post on our community forum.
  • GitHub - view the source for all of our repositories.
  • Open Collective - please consider helping us by either donating or contributing to our budget

linuxserver/foldingathome

Scarf.io pulls GitHub Stars GitHub Release GitHub Package Repository GitLab Container Registry Quay.io Docker Pulls Docker Stars Jenkins Build LSIO CI
Folding@home is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.
foldingathome

Supported Architectures

We utilise the docker manifest for multi-platform awareness. More information is available from docker here and our announcement here.
Simply pulling lscr.io/linuxserver/foldingathome:latest should retrieve the correct image for your arch, but you can also pull specific arch images via tags.
The architectures supported by this image are:
ArchitectureAvailableTag
x86-64amd64-\
arm64arm64v8-\

Application Setup

This image sets up the Folding@home client. The interface is available at https://app.foldingathome.org.
Before setting up this container, please register for an account on https://app.foldingathome.org and retrieve the account token shown in the account settings. That value should be populated in the ACCOUNT_TOKEN env var.
Once the container is created with the token and the machine name, the instance should be listed in the web app and can be controlled there.
Afterwards, the ACCOUNT_TOKEN and the MACHINE_NAME vars can be removed as the instance will already be associated with the online account and the info stored in the config folder.

Migration from version 7.6

Version 8 of fah-client has been rewritten and has some breaking changes that we can't automatically mitigate in this container.
Unlike v7, v8 no longer bundles a local webgui. The web app is loaded from an online source and can only auto-detect instances that are running on the same machine (bare metal) as the browser. This is not possible in a docker container. Therefore, upgrading to v8 requires registering for an online account, retrieving the account token and setting it in the new env var ACCOUNT_TOKEN, along with a friendly name in MACHINE_NAME.

GPU Hardware Acceleration

Nvidia

Hardware acceleration users for Nvidia will need to install the container runtime provided by Nvidia on their host, instructions can be found here: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-toolkit/latest/install-guide.html We automatically add the necessary environment variable that will utilise all the features available on a GPU on the host. Once nvidia container toolkit is installed on your host you will need to re/create the docker container with the nvidia container runtime --runtime=nvidia and add an environment variable -e NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all (can also be set to a specific gpu's UUID, this can be discovered by running nvidia-smi --query-gpu=gpu_name,gpu_uuid --format=csv ). NVIDIA automatically mounts the GPU and drivers from your host into the foldingathome docker container.

Read-Only Operation

This image can be run with a read-only container filesystem. For details please read the docs.

Usage

To help you get started creating a container from this image you can either use docker-compose or the docker cli.
>!NOTE >Unless a parameter is flagged as 'optional', it is mandatory and a value must be provided.

docker-compose (recommended, click here for more info)

---
services:
  foldingathome:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/foldingathome:latest
    container_name: foldingathome
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - ACCOUNT_TOKEN=
      - MACHINE_NAME=
      - CLI_ARGS= #optional
    volumes:
      - /path/to/foldingathome/data:/config
    ports:
      - 7396:7396 #optional
    restart: unless-stopped

docker cli (click here for more info)

docker run -d \
  --name=foldingathome \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -e TZ=Etc/UTC \
  -e ACCOUNT_TOKEN= \
  -e MACHINE_NAME= \
  -e CLI_ARGS= `#optional` \
  -p 7396:7396 `#optional` \
  -v /path/to/foldingathome/data:/config \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  lscr.io/linuxserver/foldingathome:latest

Parameters

Containers are configured using parameters passed at runtime (such as those above). These parameters are separated by a colon and indicate <external>:<internal> respectively. For example, -p 8080:80 would expose port 80 from inside the container to be accessible from the host's IP on port 8080 outside the container.
ParameterFunction
-p 7396Folding@home web gui (redirects to https://app.foldingathome.org).
-e PUID=1000for UserID - see below for explanation
-e PGID=1000for GroupID - see below for explanation
-e TZ=Etc/UTCspecify a timezone to use, see this list.
-e ACCOUNTTOKEN=Register for an account on https://app.foldingathome.org and retrieve account token in settings. Required on first start.
-e MACHINENAME=Assign a friendly name to this instance (no spaces). Required on first start.
-e CLIARGS=Optionally pass additional cli arguments to fah-client on container start.
-v /configWhere Folding@home should store its database and config.
--read-only=trueRun container with a read-only filesystem. Please read the docs.

Environment variables from files (Docker secrets)

You can set any environment variable from a file by using a special prepend FILE__.
As an example:
-e FILE__MYVAR=/run/secrets/mysecretvariable

Will set the environment variable MYVAR based on the contents of the /run/secrets/mysecretvariable file.

Umask for running applications

For all of our images we provide the ability to override the default umask settings for services started within the containers using the optional -e UMASK=022 setting. Keep in mind umask is not chmod it subtracts from permissions based on it's value it does not add. Please read up here before asking for support.

User / Group Identifiers

When using volumes (-v flags), permissions issues can arise between the host OS and the container, we avoid this issue by allowing you to specify the user PUID and group PGID.
Ensure any volume directories on the host are owned by the same user you specify and any permissions issues will vanish like magic.
In this instance PUID=1000 and PGID=1000, to find yours use id your_user as below:
id your_user

Example output:
uid=1000(your_user) gid=1000(your_user) groups=1000(your_user)

Docker Mods

Docker Mods Docker Universal Mods
We publish various Docker Mods to enable additional functionality within the containers. The list of Mods available for this image (if any) as well as universal mods that can be applied to any one of our images can be accessed via the dynamic badges above.

Support Info

  • Shell access whilst the container is running:
```bash
docker exec -it foldingathome /bin/bash
```
  • To monitor the logs of the container in realtime:
```bash
docker logs -f foldingathome
```
  • Container version number:
```bash
docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "build_version" }}' foldingathome
```
  • Image version number:
```bash
docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "build_version" }}' lscr.io/linuxserver/foldingathome:latest
```

Updating Info

Most of our images are static, versioned, and require an image update and container recreation to update the app inside. With some exceptions (noted in the relevant readme.md), we do not recommend or support updating apps inside the container. Please consult the Application Setup section above to see if it is recommended for the image.
Below are the instructions for updating containers:

Via Docker Compose

  • Update images:
* All images:

    ```bash
    docker-compose pull
    ```

* Single image:

    ```bash
    docker-compose pull foldingathome
    ```
  • Update containers:
* All containers:

    ```bash
    docker-compose up -d
    ```

* Single container:

    ```bash
    docker-compose up -d foldingathome
    ```
  • You can also remove the old dangling images:
```bash
docker image prune
```

Via Docker Run

  • Update the image:
```bash
docker pull lscr.io/linuxserver/foldingathome:latest
```
  • Stop the running container:
```bash
docker stop foldingathome
```
  • Delete the container:
```bash
docker rm foldingathome
```
  • Recreate a new container with the same docker run parameters as instructed above (if mapped correctly to a host folder, your /config folder and settings will be preserved)
  • You can also remove the old dangling images:
```bash
docker image prune
```

Image Update Notifications - Diun (Docker Image Update Notifier)

>!TIP >We recommend Diun for update notifications. Other tools that automatically update containers unattended are not recommended or supported.

Building locally

If you want to make local modifications to these images for development purposes or just to customize the logic:
git clone https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-foldingathome.git
cd docker-foldingathome
docker build \
  --no-cache \
  --pull \
  -t lscr.io/linuxserver/foldingathome:latest .

The ARM variants can be built on x8664 hardware and vice versa using lscr.io/linuxserver/qemu-static
docker run --rm --privileged lscr.io/linuxserver/qemu-static --reset

Once registered you can define the dockerfile to use with -f Dockerfile.aarch64.

Versions

  • 10.08.24: - Add libexpat1 for Nvidia support.
  • 25.06.24: - Breaking Changes - Please see the Application Setup section for more details. Restructure image for F@H v8.
  • 15.06.24: - Rebase to Ubuntu Noble, add optional cli args.
  • 14.12.22: - Rebase to Ubuntu Jammy, migrate to s6v3.
  • 15.01.22: - Rebase to Ubuntu Focal. Add arm64v8 builds (cpu only). Increase verbosity about gpu driver permission settings.
  • 09.01.21: - Add nvidia.icd.
  • 14.04.20: - Add Folding@home donation links.
  • 20.03.20: - Initial release.

Serve Foldingathome on your own domain behind Caddy, Nginx or Traefik. Fill in your domain and copy the result. It's a starting point, some apps need their own base URL or extra headers set too.

Proxying foldingathome.example.com to http://Foldingathome:80

Add this to your Caddyfile

foldingathome.example.com {
	reverse_proxy http://Foldingathome:80
}

Check the logs first

Nine times out of ten the logs tell you exactly what went wrong.

  • In Portainer, go to Containers, click the container, then Logs. Or run docker logs Foldingathome
  • Exit codes help too: 137 means killed, usually out of memory. 126 or 127 means the command inside the image is broken.

Port already in use

If deployment fails with "Bind for 0.0.0.0:80 failed: port is already allocated", something else on your server is using that port.

  • Find what's using it: sudo ss -tlnp | grep :80
  • Stop the other service, or pick a different host port. In 80:80 only the left number is yours to change, the right one belongs to the app.

Running but the page won't load

The container is up but nothing appears in your browser.

  • Use your server's real IP: http://your-server-ip:80. The 0.0.0.0 link Portainer shows isn't a real address.
  • Give it a minute after first deploy, Foldingathome can take a while to initialise.
  • Make sure your firewall allows the port, e.g. sudo ufw allow 80

Permission denied on volumes

If the logs show "permission denied", the app can't write to its data folder on the host.

  • Fix the ownership: sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /srv/lsio/foldingathome/config
  • Or set the PUID and PGID variables (defaults 1000:1000) to match your own user, found with id $USER

Image won't pull

Test the pull directly on the host: docker pull linuxserver/foldingathome:latest

  • "manifest unknown" means the tag no longer exists. This template uses latest, so try pinning a specific version instead.
  • "toomanyrequests" is the Docker Hub rate limit. Log in with docker login to raise it.
  • "no space left on device" means a full disk. Reclaim space with docker system prune

"exec format error"

This means the image was built for a different CPU architecture than your server.

  • This image supports: amd64, arm64
  • Check yours with uname -m: x86_64 is amd64, aarch64 is arm64. Raspberry Pi and other ARM boards are the usual culprits.

Container keeps restarting

The unless-stopped restart policy relaunches the app after every crash, so the real error can scroll past.

  • Check the logs right after a restart, the last few lines before it died are the useful ones.
  • Get the exit code with docker inspect Foldingathome --format '{{.State.ExitCode}}'
  • Still stuck? Redeploy once with the restart policy set to no so the failure stays visible.

Required settings are blank

ACCOUNT_TOKEN, MACHINE_NAME, CLI_ARGS have no default value, and Foldingathome may crash or misbehave if left empty.

  • Fill them in on the deploy screen before hitting deploy.

Raise an issue

Found something which isn't working as it should? Here's how to report it.

A single container

Foldingathome runs as one container, the simplest kind of app here. Just the one image to pull and nothing else wired up alongside it.

The app image

An image is the app packed up ready to go, everything Foldingathome needs bundled into one download. This template pulls linuxserver/foldingathome:latest, which Docker fetches once (about 139 MB) and then starts your own copy from.

Where the image comes from

Docker pulls its images from registries, public libraries of ready-built apps. Foldingathome's comes from Docker Hub, published by linuxserver.

Version tags

The bit after the colon in the image name is the version tag. Here it's latest, which always points at the newest build, so a redeploy can bump you to a newer release without you asking. Newest right now is 8.5.6. Pin a specific tag if you would rather stay on one version.

Which machines it runs on

Every image is built for particular CPU types. This one ships for amd64, arm64, so it runs on both regular x86 servers and ARM boards like a Raspberry Pi.

Ports

A port is the door the app answers on. A mapping like 80:80 means it's reachable on port 80 of your server, where the left number is yours to change and the right one belongs to the app. Once it's running, open http://your-server-ip:80 in a browser. It opens:

  • 80:80, likely the web interface
  • 7396:7396

Volumes

A volume is where Foldingathome keeps its files so they survive an update or a restart. Without one, anything it saves would sit inside the container and vanish the moment it's recreated. This template mounts:

  • /config from /srv/lsio/foldingathome/config on the host

Environment variables

Environment variables are the settings you hand over when you deploy, things like a password or a timezone. Foldingathome takes 6 of them, and 3 need a value before it'll start properly:

  • PUID, defaults to 1000. Run 'id [USER]' for the owner of the host volume directories to get the UID to use here.
  • PGID, defaults to 1000. Run 'id [USER]' for the owner of the host volume directories to get the GID to use here.
  • TZ, defaults to Etc/UTC. Specify a timezone to use, see this list.
  • ACCOUNT_TOKEN, needs a value. Register for an account on https://app.foldingathome.org and retrieve account token in settings. Required on first start.
  • MACHINE_NAME, needs a value. Assign a friendly name to this instance (no spaces). Required on first start.
  • CLI_ARGS, needs a value. Optionally pass additional cli arguments to fah-client on container start. [OPTIONAL]

Restart policy

The restart policy here is unless-stopped, so Docker restarts Foldingathome after a crash or reboot, but leaves it off when you stop it on purpose. You can change this on the deploy screen. The choices are no (never restart), on-failure (only after a crash), unless-stopped (restart unless you stop it), and always (bring it back no matter what).

Users and permissions

The PUID and PGID settings tell it which user and group to act as on your host. Point them at your own account (find yours with id $USER) so the files it writes into your mounted folders come out owned by you rather than root.

Networking

Nothing custom is set, so Foldingathome sits on Docker's default bridge network: its own private space that reaches the outside world only through the ports it publishes.

Container name

Once it's deployed, Portainer names the container Foldingathome. That's what you'll spot in the containers list and use in commands like docker logs Foldingathome.

Platform

The platform is linux, the kind of system the container is built to run on. Docker and Portainer handle this on a normal Linux server.

Portainer app templates

Zooming out, this whole page comes from a Portainer app template: a short recipe telling Portainer how to set Foldingathome up. Add the template list to Portainer once, then deploying Foldingathome is a click rather than a wall of config.