Conflated and incompatible use of `ARG MATLAB_RELEASE`

[BobFlapjack]

Similar to #122, the MATLAB_RELEASE argument to the Dockerfile does not allow referencing any of the non-standard builds available at https://hub.docker.com/r/mathworks/matlab-deps. For instance, R2025a-ubuntu22.04.

The argument is used on lines 21, 28 and 61:

matlab-dockerfile/Dockerfile

Line 21 in cc54447

ARG MATLAB_INSTALL_LOCATION="/opt/matlab/${MATLAB_RELEASE}"

matlab-dockerfile/Dockerfile

Line 28 in cc54447

FROM mathworks/matlab-deps:${MATLAB_RELEASE}

matlab-dockerfile/Dockerfile

Line 61 in cc54447

--release=${MATLAB_RELEASE} \

The first is install location; probably irrelevant, but who wants "/opt/matlab/R2025a-ubuntu22.04" as an install path?
The second is the FROM call - accepts the platform-inclusive tag
The third is passed into the mpm install call: clearly going to error

I have to use Ubuntu 22.04 because 24.04 fails wget every time. I have not determined if this problem is MATLAB, Docker, Ubuntu, or my environment. But I do not care - the simple reality is that 24.04 does not work for me, so I use 22.04. But this means your Dockerfile is not grab-and-go. I have to fork/clone/copy-paste it, then learn Docker (🤮) to change a few things. Then a year later when matlab-batch does not accept my new batch token format, I have to manually merge your Dockerfile changes with my modified version

All that said, this stuff is great! Compared to figuring everything out myself, this saves me an incalculable amount of time and hair-pulling. Keep up the good work

[josmartin]

@BobFlapjack Firstly a comment on the Ubuntu 22.04 vs. 24.04 part of your discussion above. I cloned the repo and made the following single modification to the Dockerfile replacing line 28 with

FROM mathworks/matlab-deps:r2025a-ubuntu24.04

This (at least for me) leads to a clean build with

$ docker build -t matlab-ubuntu-24.04:r2025a .
[+] Building 108.7s (9/9) FINISHED                                                                       docker:default
 => [internal] load build definition from Dockerfile                                                               0.0s
 => => transferring dockerfile: 4.34kB                                                                             0.0s
 => [internal] load metadata for docker.io/mathworks/matlab-deps:r2025a-ubuntu24.04                                0.6s
 => [internal] load .dockerignore                                                                                  0.1s
 => => transferring context: 2B                                                                                    0.0s
 => [1/5] FROM docker.io/mathworks/matlab-deps:r2025a-ubuntu24.04@sha256:85af318af21f0b54092fde9efedb3eb3bd66205  13.5s
 => => resolve docker.io/mathworks/matlab-deps:r2025a-ubuntu24.04@sha256:85af318af21f0b54092fde9efedb3eb3bd662056  0.1s
 => => sha256:5ec8b603e98e4734b6cbb5a68c60cb0dc505207f492bde2f2238324b90fe6ee6 2.48kB / 2.48kB                     0.0s
 => => sha256:e87500e698966458d9dfc34df84602985c9821f39666619792fe6282aa6df5d4 30.59MB / 30.59MB                   1.1s
 => => sha256:b0899d8d96b93fdad7918b1fa5c60c835bd75fcd401d4bb03ee5836f24d01658 502B / 502B                         0.2s
 => => sha256:755093ba03f26316287ed2371b9c5ea4043bb7d946d180bf2890b156ef2405c2 275.63MB / 275.63MB                 5.9s
 => => sha256:85af318af21f0b54092fde9efedb3eb3bd662056f3acf7c20bfbb990f8d0262a 1.16kB / 1.16kB                     0.0s
 => => sha256:4f4fb700ef54461cfa02571ae0db9a0dc1e0cdb5577484a6d75e68dc38e8acc1 32B / 32B                           0.3s
 => => extracting sha256:e87500e698966458d9dfc34df84602985c9821f39666619792fe6282aa6df5d4                          0.8s
 => => extracting sha256:b0899d8d96b93fdad7918b1fa5c60c835bd75fcd401d4bb03ee5836f24d01658                          0.0s
 => => extracting sha256:755093ba03f26316287ed2371b9c5ea4043bb7d946d180bf2890b156ef2405c2                          7.1s
 => => extracting sha256:4f4fb700ef54461cfa02571ae0db9a0dc1e0cdb5577484a6d75e68dc38e8acc1                          0.0s
 => [2/5] RUN export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive     && apt-get update     && apt-get install --no-install-re  12.2s
 => [3/5] RUN adduser --shell /bin/bash --disabled-password --gecos "" matlab     && echo "matlab ALL=(ALL) NOPAS  0.5s
 => [4/5] WORKDIR /home/matlab                                                                                     0.1s
 => [5/5] RUN wget -q https://www.mathworks.com/mpm/glnxa64/mpm     && chmod +x mpm     && sudo HOME=${HOME} ./m  59.2s
 => exporting to image                                                                                            22.2s
 => => exporting layers                                                                                           22.1s
 => => writing image sha256:c2fcc93c4bf265ee36619eab54e75a5863638a1a03601880f2c8a90b5fb7dd70                       0.0s
 => => naming to docker.io/library/matlab-ubuntu-24.04:r2025a

So I do wonder if there is something funky going on with your network connection? Happy to help out more on the wget issue with some info on how it is failing.

I understand your request on MATLAB_RELEASE and I suspect we will land on scoping it to the definition of the MATLAB install and not expand to including all the mathworks/matlab-deps variants. Thus, we should do a better job of stating (perhaps in the Dockerfile) that under some circumstances you may need to change line 28 to incorporate variants. I suppose we could consider writing line 28 as

FROM mathworks/matlab-deps:${MATLAB_RELEASE}${DEPS_VARIANT}

where generally DEPS_VARIANT is empty but if you wanted a build time variant you would specify it as "-ubuntu24.04" ... but this does make the whole file a little harder to read.

[BobFlapjack]

I will admit I am not GitLab/CI/Docker/etc. fluent. I know just enough about my exact singular environment to be dangerous, but not how to replicate behavior or generate minimum reproduction examples. My environment is heavily secured, so who knows how that plays into the conversation

I spawned a clean project with a two-line Dockerfile. FROM ubuntu-24.04 followed by the appropriate apt-get install wget stuff. This test repeatably threw about 50 "out of memory" errors when it got to openssl. When I change that one character in ubuntu-24.04 to ubuntu-22.04 and rerun, everything works

In my heavier project using the MATLAB Dockerfile, I got slightly different wget errors. It failed in the wget call (because I think wget was already installed so the apt-get bit was no-op). The error was again something about openssl. Sorry I can not share links or screen shots ☹️. Similarly, when I modify to include the 22.04 variant, everything works

As for the arguments, I would appreciate a solution that allows me to FROM mathworks-ref-arch (or whatever the proper notation is). Making my own copy and changing line 28 inevitably leads to merge conflict (in the sense of "am I up to date, did I remove that line or did they add it?)

Thanks!

[DanWoodrichNOAA]

@BobFlapjack since you mentioned you are in a secured environment, wonder if you have the same issue with wget that I did. My impression after some testing was that their server endpoint is not using FIPS 140-3 compliant TLS handshake, which is a federal standard, and a high bar compared to what's commonplace on the internet currently (breaks a lot of stuff OOB).

@josmartin maybe helpful if related

#148 (comment)