Recipe of a docker image with Open-MPI 3.1.4 and mpi4py

Dockerfile

FROM ubuntu:18.04

ENV USER mpitest
ENV HOME /home/$USER
ENV MPI_DIR=/opt/ompi
ENV PATH="$MPI_DIR/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
ENV LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MPI_DIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
WORKDIR $HOME

RUN apt-get -q update \
    && apt-get install -y \
    python3 python3-dev python3-pip \
    gcc gfortran binutils \
    && pip3 install --upgrade pip \
    && apt-get clean \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/*

ADD https://download.open-mpi.org/release/open-mpi/v3.1/openmpi-3.1.4.tar.bz2 .
RUN tar xf openmpi-3.1.4.tar.bz2 \
    && cd openmpi-3.1.4 \
    && ./configure --prefix=$MPI_DIR \
    && make -j4 all \
    && make install \
    && cd .. && rm -rf \
    openmpi-3.1.4 openmpi-3.1.4.tar.bz2 /tmp/*

RUN groupadd -r mpitest \
    && useradd -r -g mpitest $USER \
    && chown -R mpitest:mpitest $HOME

USER $USER
RUN pip3 install --user -U setuptools \
    && pip3 install --user mpi4py

Thank you, it helped a lot. I was not able to install open-mpi on docker using other approaches like installing libopenmpi-dev & openmpi-bin or mpich equivalents libmpich-dev & mpich. Your approach of installing from sources worked!