Dear all,

today I’d like to point to the Rocker project, which provides a suite of Docker images for particular tasks. Even though the Rocker initiative already exists since 2014 and I read about it once in a while, there were not many use cases for me to try it out.

However, I recently stumbled upon problem where Rocker proved to be a really convenient solution. I was trying to get some R – GIS bridges (QGIS, SAGA, GRASS) and V8 running on my Manjaro Linux System. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that all this would really mess up my system for several reasons. I would have needed to install a large number of dependencies, some of which were rather large in terms of required disk space. In addition, I would have needed to downgrade SAGA and QGIS in order to get them running through R.

This is when a Docker containers come in really handy, as things basically work out of the box without messing up your system and without the need to grapple with dependencies. I simply used the Geocomputation with R docker image and ran RStudio in my browser.

Here’s a short description on how to get a rocker image running. First install docker on your system (Manjaro is based on Arch Linux and thus uses the pacman package manager):

# update system
sudo pacman -Syu

# install docker
sudo pacman -S docker

# run and enable docker at startup
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

# configure docker user
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Note that the last line enables users without sudo privileges to run docker.

Once you have installed docker, you can pull docker images and run them:

# pull image
docker pull robinlovelace/geocompr

# run image
docker run -e PASSWORD=pass --rm -p 8787:8787 robinlovelace/geocompr

You can now open up RStudio server in your browser by navigating to http://localhost:8787/. Use rstudio as username and pass as password.

After login you are in a RStudio server session running in your docker container with access to all pre-installed packages.

For the sake of simplicity, I added a docker run alias to my .zshrc:

alias geoR="docker run -d -e PASSWORD=pass -p 8787:8787  -v /home/ms/Git:/home/rstudio/Git robinlovelace/geocompr"

The -v flag mounts the Git folder (containing my GitLab projects) from my local home directory to be accessible in the RStudio session running in the docker container. For a detailed description of used flags, see the documentation of docker run.

You might want to have a look at the rocker profile on dockerhub and check out the images therein.

Matthias