7  Working with Docker

Docker is already installed on Rossinante. It can be a good solution to work in a sandbox environment. A lot of images can be downloaded from Docker Hub.

Information

If you want to use Docker on Rossinante, you need to contact the administrator. To check if you can use Docker, run this command on Rossinante:

groups
## jdoe ... docker ...

If you see that you are member of the Unix group docker, you can use the software.

7.0.1 Docker with R

Rossinante is updated everyday: this means that you’ll always use the latest version of R. But in some cases, you may want to use a previous version or you may want to freeze the version of R you use. Docker is perfect for that.

The initiative Rocker provides different Docker images for R. Each image is available for different versions of R. The Table 7.1 presents some common Docker images for R.

Table 7.1: Some common Docker images for R

Image	Base image	Description
rocker/r-ver	ubuntu	Install only R from source
rocker/rstudio	rocker/r-ver	Adds RStudio Server
rocker/tidyverse	rocker/rstudio	Adds tidyverse packages & devtools
rocker/verse	rocker/tidyverse	Adds tex & publishing-related package
rocker/geospatial	rocker/verse	Adds geospatial packages

If you want to use the rocker/r-ver image with the version 4.1.3 of R, first check if this image is already downloaded on Rossinante:

# List available Docker images on Rossinante ----
docker images

## REPOSITORY          TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
## rocker/r-ver        4.2.3     4ea29847d93e   13 days ago    825MB
## rocker/geospatial   4.2.2     4a1f8be3b4ef   3 weeks ago    4.42GB
## rocker/geospatial   latest    4a1f8be3b4ef   3 weeks ago    4.42GB

If this image is not available, you can install it with:

# Pull a Docker image ----
docker pull rocker/r-ver:4.1.3

And check the new list of Docker images:

# List available Docker images on Rossinante ----
docker images

## REPOSITORY          TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
## rocker/r-ver        4.2.3     4ea29847d93e   13 days ago    825MB
## rocker/r-ver        4.1.3     c7c1edfe6a8d   13 days ago    857MB
## rocker/geospatial   4.2.2     4a1f8be3b4ef   3 weeks ago    4.42GB
## rocker/geospatial   latest    4a1f8be3b4ef   3 weeks ago    4.42GB

To use this version of R, we need to create a Docker container from this Docker image.

docker run -it --rm rocker/r-ver:4.1.3