beacon2ri/training_ui repository overview

⁠(How to) Run Beacon Training UI in a Docker container

This document explains how to install and use Docker to run Beacon on a local machine.

⁠Contents

1. Install Docker
2. Test that it works
3. Get the Beacon container image
4. Start up the Beacon container
5. Connect to the container
6. Inject the annotation databases into the container
7. Run a Beacon command in the container
8. Use a mounted volume to access data that lives outside the container

⁠1. Install Docker

Follow the relevant link below depending on your computer system; on Mac and Windows, select the "Stable channel" download. Run through the installation instructions and initial setup page; they are very straightforward and should only take you a few minutes (not counting download time). We have included instructions below for all steps after that first page, so you shouldn't need to go to any other pages in the Docker documentation. Frankly their docs are targeted at people who want to do things like run web applications on the cloud and can be quite frustrating to deal with.

MacOS systems Click here for the MacOS install instructions⁠.

On Mac, the installation adds a menu bar item that looks like a whale/container-ship, which conveniently shows you the status of the Docker "daemon" (= program that runs in the background) and gives you GUI access to various Docker-related functionalities. But you can also just use it from the command-line, which is what we'll do in the rest of this tutorial.

Windows systems Click here for the Windows install instructions⁠.

Note that on some Windows systems (including non-Pro versions like Windows Home, and older versions) the "normal" Docker app doesn't work, and you have to use an older app called Docker Toolbox, which you can find here.

Linux systems Click here for the linux install instructions⁠.

⁠2. Test that it works

Now, open a terminal window and invoke the docker program directly. Checking the version is always a good way to test that a program will run without investing too much effort into finding a command that will work, so let's do:

docker --version

This should return something like "Docker version 20.10.14, build a224086".

If you run into trouble at this step, you may need to run one or more of the following commands:

docker-machine restart default

docker-machine regenerate-certs

docker-machine env

Let's just assume your Docker install worked fine. (If not, let us know and we'll try to help you)

⁠3. Get the Beacon Training UI container image

Still in your terminal (it doesn't matter where your working directory is), run the following command to retrieve the Beacon image from Docker Hub:

docker pull beacon2ri/training_ui:v0.1

Note that the last bit after training_ui: is the version tag, which you can change to get a different version than what we've specified here. At the time of writing, we're using the latest released version.

The beacon training_ui container image is quite large so the download may take a little while if you've never done this before. The good news is that next time you need to pull a training_ui image (e.g. to get another release), Docker will only pull the components that have been updated, so it will go faster.

⁠4. Start up the beacon training_ui container

There are several different ways to do this in Docker. Here we're going to use the simplest invocation that gets us the functionality we need, i.e. the ability to log into the container once it's running and execute commands from inside it.

docker run -p 8080:8080 --network deploy_beacon-priv -tid --name beacon_training_ui beacon2ri/training_ui:v0.1

If all goes well, this will start up the container in detached mode and should be present in the container list. To view the containers run :

docker ps

⁠5. Connect to the container

The beacon training_ui container is running in detached mode or in the background. To connect, you should invoke from your terminal :

docker exec -ti training_ui bash

And you will automatically get logged into it. Your terminal prompt will change to something like this:

root@a5b3750629a8:/usr/share/beacon-ri#

At this point, you can use classic shell commands to explore the container and see what's in there, if you like.

⁠7. Try the training UI

The beacon training UI is available from http://localhost:8080/⁠

Have fun!