cardcorp/r-ssh repository overview

⁠r-ssh

Dockerfile to install SSH client and bindfs⁠ on the top of rocker/r-base⁠, resulting in a minimal R environment to be able to SSH remote machines with the private keys mounted from the host.

This approach resolves the following two issues:

• you might want to avoid adding the SSH keys (sensitive information) to the Docker image
• mounting the SSH keys from the host results in file permissions not allowing you to actually use those.

This image does the following things to overcome these issues:

• install an SSH client
• install bindfs to be able to remount directories and files with updated permissions
• creates an .ssh and .ssh-external directories in the docker home folder
• adds a record in /etc/fstab to mount /home/docker/.ssh-external to the main SSH key folder with the right permissions

Please note that, unfortunately, it's not trivial to use this setup. You have to:

1. Mount the SSH keys from the host to the /home/docker/.ssh-external folder, e.g.:

docker run \
  -v '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa:/home/docker/.ssh-external/id_rsa:ro' \
  --rm -ti cardcorp/r-ssh

1. And as there's no running daemon to auto-mount, you have to do this manually as root:

mount -o nonempty -a

Alternatively, you can start R as docker after re-mounting the keys by:

docker run \
  -v '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa:/home/docker/.ssh-external/id_rsa:ro' \
  --rm -ti cardcorp/r-ssh \
  sh -c "mount -o nonempty -a;su docker -c \"R --vanilla\""