1. FEniCS – workflow Start the Docker Quickstart terminal / terminal
Open your FEniCS container docker start –i myfenics where myfenics is the name of your FEniCS container
Change directory to you’re the folder that FEniCS shares with your host computer cd shared
You should now be able to see the files in your shared folder on your host system. To look at them type dir –l (for directory with long listing, with a lower case letter el) or ls –l (for list directory with long option, again with a lower case letter el)
If your fenics project folder is a subfolder of your shared folder, you might have to do another cd cd my_fenics_folder where my_fenics_folder is the name of your fenics project folder.
Run your python code
python my_fenics_code.py

2. Running FEniCS – useful hints for operating in the bash shell
Avoid filenames or folder names with spaces in them, as they can cause confusion when working between operating systems. If you want spaces for readability, replace them with underscores: file name with spaces can become filename_with_no_spaces
Pathname separators are forward slashes “/”, not backslash “\” as in Windows. Filename extensions with “.” are OK. So, for example: /home/fenics/shared/my_fenics_folder/my_favourite_fenics_project.py
If you forget where you are in the folder / file system just type in pwd (for present working directory). Also, the command prompt shows your current folder. (“~” denotes your home directory.) You can then use dir or ls together with cd to navigate your way through the folder / file system.
Some useful shortcuts: cd .. Will move up one directory/folder to the “parent” directory/folder; cd by itself, will take you to your home directory in the container, which will be something like /home/fenics cd start* will take you to the folder whose pathname begins with “start” if it exists and is unique; otherwise you will get an error. In effect, the wild card “*” expands to anything that makes sense. Here “start” can be anything.