rocker-ultra

Containerised RStudio with bells+whistles for HPC and everywhere

---

rocker-ultra aims to simplify launching an RStudio server in Singularity with a single wrapper script, with managment of package directories per-version in your home directory, auto-free port finding, per-session password generation and SSH port forwarding instructions for free. It is based on the containers developed by the rocker project (but not affiliated).

By default rocker-ultra uses a custom image based on rocker/rstudio but with Seurat dependencies pre-installed.

Quickstart

Run:

# Download the `rstudio.sh` from this repo
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MonashBioinformaticsPlatform/rocker-ultra/main/rstudio.sh

chmod +x ./rstudio.sh
./rstudio.sh

It may take some time to download images. Eventually you'll be presented with instructions to login, including a generated password, eg

INFO:    Creating SIF file...
INFO:    Build complete: rstudio_3.6.0.sif

Finding an available port ...
Got one !

On you local machine, open an SSH tunnel like:
  ssh -N -L 8787:localhost:8787 myusername@login-node.example.com
  or
  ssh -N -L 8787:localhost:8787 myusername@192.16.0.10

Point your web browser at http://localhost:8787

Login to RStudio with:
  username: myusername
  password: Y9qmTCxlM30ArhY7biC5

Protip: You can choose your version of R from any of the tags listed here: https://hub.docker.com/r/rocker/rstudio/tags
        and set the environment variable IMAGE, eg
        IMAGE=rocker/rstudio:3.5.3 rstudio.sh

Starting RStudio Server (R version 3.6.0)

If you'd like to select your R version, set the IMAGE environment variable like this:

IMAGE=ghcr.io/monashbioinformaticsplatform/rocker-ultra/rocker-seurat:4.4.0-5.0.3 ./rstudio.sh

See available rocker-ultra containers here. 4.4.0-5.0.3 means R v4.4.0, Seurat v5.0.3 (the Seurat package, among others, are pre-installed in these containers). These containers include most system dependencies required to install any CRAN or Bioconductor package - if you find an R package that won't install due to a missing system dependency (apt-get, -dev header packages) please create an issue.

You can also use 'vanilla' containers provided by the Rocker project (eg rocker/rstudio:3.5.3), but be aware that system dependencies required to install packages may be missing.

Using renv

You can use renv inside the container (and ignore any of the pre-installed R packages). This is generally a good idea for 'real projects', since you'll get an renv.lock file that allows the same dependencies to be easily reinstalled if you move the project folder to another computer.

Note that the renv folder itself (typically) won't be compatible between different container versions. If you switch containers mid-project, you should move or delete the renv folder and do an renv::restore() (which reinstalls the dependencies listed in the renv.lock file). This will ensure your installed packages are compabile with the new container.

On M3 / Massive

Specific instructions for the M3 HPC site are here.

Building a container

You probably don't need to build these containers yourself, since pre-built versions already exist on Dockerhub / Github Pacakges, and are automatically built via CI. However, you may want to build one to generate a custom version for some purpose.

For example:

REGISTRY="pansapiens"
VERSION_TAG="4.2.3-4.3.0"
docker build \
  -t "${REGISTRY}/rocker-seurat:latest" \
  -t "${REGISTRY}/rocker-seurat:${VERSION_TAG}" \
  -f "dockerfiles/rocker-seurat/${VERSION_TAG}/Dockerfile" \
  "dockerfiles/rocker-seurat/${VERSION_TAG}"

# Generate a Singularity image file
singularity build "rocker-seurat_${VERSION_TAG}.sif" "docker-daemon://${REGISTRY}/rocker-seurat:${VERSION_TAG}"

# Run with your custom Singularity image
IMAGE="./rocker-seurat_${VERSION_TAG}.sif" ./rstudio.sh

History

rocker-ultra began with this gist