stevedore: Docker Client For R

In richfitz/stevedore: Docker Client

Docker Client For R

Description

stevedore implements a docker client for R. Docker is a framework for "containerisation" - abstracting the details of how software is installed and run. It is conceptually similar to virtualisation but much lighter weight.

Details

Within the R space containers have been discussed for:

Reproducible research: collecting all dependencies for an analysis into an image that can be run by other people without installation headaches.

Testing packages: Collect all the requirements of a package together and run your tests in an isolated environment.

Containers can also be used to construct larger applications with multiple processes that need to talk to each other - for example a database, API server and proxy server. One might also implement something like a set of shiny servers that are load balanced through a proxy!

This package provides a complete interface to docker allowing you to basically everything that can be done from the command line from within R. All communication happens over docker's HTTP API and does not use system commands. As a result, the information returned back to R is richer and the interface is likely to be reliable than parsing the command line output. stevedore's interface is largely automatically generated so will track new features available in the docker daemon closely.

The interface is designed to be similar to docker's command link API - the command for creating a network on the command line is

docker network create mynetwork

and in stevedore can be done as

docker <- stevedore::docker_client()
docker$network$create("mynetwork")

Familiarity with the command line interface will be helpful but probably as much because of the concepts as the details.

To get started, please see the package vignette - running vignette("stevedore") will work if the package was installed with the vignettes, or see https://richfitz.github.io/stevedore/. A good place to get started with the reference documentation is the docker_client function.

richfitz/stevedore documentation built on July 22, 2023, 1:13 p.m.