Stan Docker Image Plans

This page serves to collect ideas for an official Stan Docker image.

Use-cases

• Self-contained environment for teaching
• Reference stack to build upon for doing reproducible research
• Debugging and development of Stan by developers
• Automated build and test system

The question is how exactly the group satisfies a particular use case when the Stan project offers so many options to potential users. It might make more sense to think about how technical implementations map onto use-cases, with the hope to minimize the number of different images we would need to maintain.

• An interactive session like JupyterHub or Rstudio server would be invaluable in a class but unnecessary when trying to do integration testing.
• Applied researchers using one of the R interfaces would likely want a number of other Stan connected R packages, while those adding functionality to Stan Math probably don't need posterior or loo.

Important Questions

• Which interfaces and components in StanDev should get their own dedicated image?
• Should pre-compiled be included?
• Which existing Docker software stack(s) should these containers build upon?

Jupyter Docker Stack Proposal

Desired Features

• fast compiles (clang?)
• different compiler settings for modelling or Stan development
• support for compilation with ccache to speedup re-compilation
• persistency through Docker volumes(?) or local mounts ( maybe docker-compose? )
• pre-deploy Stan libraries such as the TBB, boost
• MPI enable / disabled
• Integration with Jenkins
• Integration with Rocker project
• Integration with JupyterHub
• Rapid availability with each release (maybe even a dev version supporting to create the image from git hashes)