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rocker-org / rocker-versioned

Run current & prior versions of R using docker
https://hub.docker.com/r/rocker/r-ver
GNU General Public License v2.0
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rocker images without rstudio #128

Closed jmigueldelgado closed 5 years ago

jmigueldelgado commented 5 years ago

Hi. I wish there would be rocker images for eg geospatial without the need to install rstudio and rstudio-server. This would make it easier for combining shiny-verse and geospatial in light-weight shiny applications.

cboettig commented 5 years ago

Hi @jmigueldelgado , can you explain a little bit more about the issue? e.g. is it just knowing that there are an extra odd 100mb being included on the image which you don't need, or are you looking for how to run the geospatial image without having rstudio start up? (you can provide any other default command, e.g. docker run --rm -ti rocker/geospatial R, to just run with an R console.

We find it is a very common concern that of users that these prebuilt images include some piece of software they don't need, particularly when that piece is visible. Note that geospatial image also includes a python environment, a java environment, a tex stack and loads of other things that with enough dedication you could chisel out of a highly specialized image.

In the next big development push, we may be able to modularize the layer scripts a bit so it's easier to customize the stack (say, you want geospatial + cuda, but not rstudio+verse), but for now it's best not to sweat the extra megabytes. Docker's layer caching can be a big help in dealing with the minimizing image size on disk and bandwidth, so this is not often the rate-limiting issue.

jmigueldelgado commented 5 years ago

Thank you so much for your reply @cboettig . This would be great:

In the next big development push, we may be able to modularize the layer scripts a bit so it's easier to customize the stack (say, you want geospatial + cuda, but not rstudio+verse)

I will give you some context. Currently I am trying to deploy a shiny app that depends on geospatial libraries, including rgdal. I developed the app in my group and now it is time to deploy it to our "client".

I am a beginner in docker, so I start setting up a dockerfile, where everything runs smoothly: FROM ubuntu:latest followed by FROM rocker/shiny-verse and all is running fine. Then I try FROM rocker/geospatial and rstudio starts complaining about a user name and all these ports that I really do not want to set up for my app, because I do not need them. I am just looking for a safe way of installing rdgal and libgdal-dev and some other spatial libraries in a shiny server. rocker/geospatial solves my problem, but then requires additional configuration due to rstudio that some old-school R users like me will not know how to solve quickly.

My workaround was

RUN apt-get install -y git libgdal-dev
RUN Rscript -e "install.packages('rgdal')"

but I know that this is somewhat more vulnerable than using a packaged image like yours.

Hope this helps in shaping the future of rocker, which is very very useful for me! Thanks!

eddelbuettel commented 5 years ago

The two lines

RUN apt-get install -y git libgdal-dev
RUN Rscript -e "install.packages('rgdal')"

are good. I would also update just in case (unless the container already did) and wrap it into one:

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y git libgdal-dev && \
    install.r rgdal

where install.r is a helper we use throughout Rocker.

cboettig commented 5 years ago

looks like we're all set here so closing this out