Expose VOLUME for Kitematic users?

[andrewheiss]

Before depending on rocker-versioned, rocker images included a VOLUME instruction to expose /home/rstudio for Kitematic users (see https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker/commit/732378c424030567d75d8dacd9b4a6315a91da52, for instance). This instruction is gone now in rocker-versioned. Is this by design? Can VOLUME be added back in, or is it best to just use the various rocker images from terminal?

[cboettig]

I always found the lack of configuration options in Kitematic rather perplexing, but yeah, this seems reasonable. I think perhaps we should make it a specific sub-directory (e.g. /home/rstudio/kitematic maybe?) rather than /home/rstudio, to avoid potential conflicts. Sound good?

[andrewheiss]

Yeah, that sounds great.

I guess users could do it on their own by making their own Dockerfiles with "FROM rocker/tidyverse:latest" or whatever at the top, but having it in the core Rocker files helps, I think.

[cboettig]

agreed; anyone wanting to use the Kitematic GUI probably doesn't want to have to write custom dockerfiles. I've added this to rstudio (does the base R version work from Kitematic? e.g. does it open an R terminal for you like it does with docker run, or does it not do anything? I know Kitematic works with rstudio so I put it in starting at that image)

[andrewheiss]

It looks like it puts the R startup message in the container logs, but that's all. The actual program is only accessible from the CLI (i.e. after typing docker exec -i -t r-base /bin/bash)

[cboettig]

Thanks for confirming, that's what I figured. So it's fine we don't bother exposing a kitematic VOLUME until the rstudio part of the stack.