grantmcdermott / containerit-demo

Simple demo that builds a Docker image from a repo's contents using the containerit package

containerit demo

This repo serves as a simple demo for writing a Dockerfile (and building the resulting Docker image) using the containerit R package. You should read more about containerit at the linked package homepage, but very briefly: it uses some neat heuristics and shortcuts to build a Docker image simply based on the contents of your existing directory or repo. Or, more precisely, the R files contained therein.

To run the demo, clone this repo to your local computer and then run the create-docker.R script (e.g. using RStudio or $ Rscript create-docker.R). This will:

1. Write a Dockerfile to disk (based on the contents of the R/ sub-directory of the repo), and
2. Build the corresponding Docker image (creatively titled containerit-demo) associated with our new Dockerfile

The latter step requires that you actually have Docker installed and running on your system. (If not, then you can at least still write the Dockerfile for others to use/build.) Assuming that this is true, you can run the container by calling, e.g. $ docker run --rm -ti containerit-demo.

Asides

The Docker image that we're building here isn't terribly exciting or complicated. It mostly contains some additional spatial libraries (since the R/ sub-directory requires the sf package) and builds upon the rocker/rstudio stack. But the point is that all that work is done for us automatically and with minimal pain.

If you are unfamiliar with Docker then I strongly recommend checking out the Rocker wiki (e.g. this page), or this ROpenSci tutorial first.