In the past few days, I tried to dockerize my development environment and put my daily programming tools inside container. I tried to install zplug inside docker container and met some issues. In this post, I want to share how to install zplug and other plugins inside the Docker container.

Following the recommended way in the zplug git repo, I use the instruction below to install zplug:

RUN curl -sL --proto-redir -all,https https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zplug/installer/master/installer.zsh | zsh

Unfortunately, the build fails and gives the following error message:

The command ‘/bin/sh -c curl -sL –proto-redir -all,https https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zplug/installer/master/installer.zsh | zsh’ returned a non-zero code: 1

After some searching, I find that this issue is caused by the Unicode characters that zplug uses in its message. In order to deal with this, we need to set up a locale in UTF-8 format (see here for details):

RUN apt-get install -y locales && locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
ENV LC_ALL en_US.UTF-8

Another issue is that I get an error when I use the following instruction to install plugins:

The error message is that:

The command zplug install works in a normal terminal, but fails to work when we are building a docker image. I change the instruction to

RUN ["zsh", "-ic", "zplug install"]

based on discussions here and I can run the command without errors.

Unfortunately, another error occurs when zplug tries to install plugins. The errors look like this:

✘  Unknown error         lukechilds/zsh-nvm
✘  Unknown error         zsh-users/zsh-completions
✘  Unknown error         junegunn/fzf-bin

According to discussions here, it is caused by the missing package gawk. We need to install the gawk package before running the zplug install command:

RUN apt-get install gawk
RUN ["zsh", "-ic", "zplug install"]

After solving all these issues, I can install zplug and other plugins successfully inside the docker container.