I build it in a container for work and didn't find it that difficult to be honest. And Google has plenty of example Dockerfiles that show the steps needed.

The only real system dependencies are Java8, maven and texlive (and Python/R if you build for that). Then it's `make-distribution.sh` with the appropriate flags. Scala and everything else that is needed is downloaded by maven. The resulting directory is self-contained assuming you have java8 runtime on your target machine.