bocinsky/bocin_base repository overview

⁠A Docker container that adds ffmpeg⁠ and ghostscript⁠ to rocker/geospatial⁠

Docker⁠ is a virtual computing environment that facilitates reproducible research---it allows for research results to be produced independent of the machine on which they are computed. Docker users describe computing environments in a text format called a "Dockerfile", which when read by the Docker software builds a virtual machine, or "container". Other users can then load the container on their own computers. Users can upload container images to Docker Hub⁠, and the image for this Docker container is available at https://hub.docker.com/r/bocinsky/bocin_base/⁠.

The Dockerfile in this repository uses rocker/geospatial:3.4.4⁠, which provides R, RStudio Server⁠, the tidyverse⁠ of R packages as its base image and adds several geospatial software packages (GDAL⁠, GEOS⁠, and proj.4⁠. The Dockerimage adds ffmpeg⁠ and ghostscript⁠ to rocker/geospatial⁠.

⁠Downloading and running the Docker container image

The commands below demonstrate three ways to run the docker container. In each, we use the -v argument to mount a local working directory to the Docker container. See this Docker cheat sheet⁠ for other arguments.

⁠Run the docker container interactively with a terminal prompt

You can run the container in interactive mode with:

docker run -v [PATH TO LOCAL DIRECTORY]:[PATH TO CONTAINER MOUNT POINT] -it bocinsky/bocin_base bash

You can use the exit command to stop the container.

⁠Run the analysis from within a Dockerized RStudio IDE

You can also host RStudio Server locally to use the RStudio browser-based IDE. Run:

docker run -v [PATH TO LOCAL DIRECTORY]:[PATH TO CONTAINER MOUNT POINT] -p 8787:8787 bocinsky/bocin_base

#example
docker run -v /Users/bocinsky/git/asian_niche/:~/asian_niche/ -p 8787:8787 bocinsky/bocin_base

Then, open a browser (we find Chrome⁠ works best) and navigate to "localhost:8787" or or run docker-machine ip default in the shell to find the correct IP address, and log in with rstudio/rstudio as the user name and password. In the explorer (lower right pane in RStudio), navigate to the container mount point.

⁠Building the Docker container from scratch

If you wish to build the Docker container locally for this project from scratch, simply cd into the asian_niche/ directory and run:

docker build -t bocinsky/bocin_base .

The -t argument gives the resulting container image a name. You can then run the container as described above.