ParaView in Docker with OpenGL support

You may try these steps:

• install mesa-utils in your image
• add your container user to group video.

Then you should be able to use software rendered OpenGL.

Sharing X unix socket from host can have some caveats. You can use mviereck/x11docker to run your image on a second X server instead. Software rendered OpenGL works fine. Hardware rendering is experimental and in development.

On your github repo example you are using host display :0, sharing $DISPLAY and unix sockets:

docker run -ti -e DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix paraview 

If you share all files in dev/dri with your container (especially /dev/dri/card0), most probably you get hardware acceleration. If you get some rendering glitches, you can use docker run option --ipc=host. Depending on X setup, one needs to share ~/.Xauthority and $XAUTHORITY, too, or setting xhost +SI:localuser:root on host if container user is root.

CAUTION: This setup breaks down container isolation! (For better isolation, check out x11docker.)

In addition to what @mviereck proposed, on an nvidia-docker container, I needed to do docker run --privileged. My entire docker run command looks like:

Obviously this isn't an ideal solution, but is sufficient for many local use cases where isolation isn't a major concern.

CMD="${DOCKER} run --detach=true \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
                --privileged \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                --group-add ${DOCKER_GROUP_ID} \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
                --env HOME=${HOME_DIR} \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
                --env DISPLAY \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
                --interactive \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
                --name DevContainer \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                --net=host \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
                --rm \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
                --tty \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
                --user=${USER_ID}:${GROUP_ID} \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
                --volume $HOME_DIR_HOST:${HOME_DIR} \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                --volume $WORK_DIR:${WORK_DIR} \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
                --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
                --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
                ${IDEA_IMAGE}"

Many of those options are superfluous to OpenGL, but useful for certain applications needing extended access.

Since I'm using an nvidia docker container, $DOCKER is actually nvidia-docker in my case. I also added my host user to the video group, though I'm not sure if that mattered.