I just reminded myself about the ‘vnc_container’ template, and looking through the standard documentation the examples of implementing RStudio via container (Stanford and Utah) are using the ‘basic’ template.
Has anyone used the ‘vnc_container’ template to implement RStudio?
Perhaps I’m not yet adapting to look into the expanding GOOD resources. I’d be equally happy tohave access to code examples, or, discussions as to why ‘vnc_container’ offers a better outcome than the original ‘basic’ template.
I could give some context on the usage of vnc_container (in the VNC app).
We used to do our own containerized version of the VNC app app using the vnc template, essentially providing wrappers that ran singularity exec vncserver instead of vncserver directly. That worked fine for ~3 years, until we upgraded from Apptainer 1.2.5 to 1.3.4. The version upgrade changed some cleanup behaviour in Apptainer, causing it to cleanup daemonized processes even though they were still running and needed. I spent way too much time trying various tricks to get the standard vnc template working, until I came to the conclusion that using Singularity/Apptainer instances was the right solution to the problem. That is exactly what vnc_container does. It provides an out of the box method for handling the container instances for the VNC. I was quite happy to see that @georgia had already done that work, saving me quite a bit of time.
For RStudio, I don’t think a similar template for a containerized version is necessary. In all other containerized applications we are running in our OOD instances, the basic template has been more than enough, including for RStudio.
Thanks, Robin – good to hear from you. Already 1/2 year since the GOOD meeting ( :
Would you be able to share code examples? I’m still trying to learn and to share with others in my local team key information about OnDemand. App support is high on our list, as most of our apps were deployed based on examples that were shared 4, 5, or 6 years ago. RStudio is our closest to using a container for an app, and we’re still just using the ‘hybrid’ approach where the container only launches the RStudio-Server. GitHub - OSC/bc_osc_rstudio_server: Batch Connect - OSC RStudio Server
Again, if you are able to point me to a code example involving vnc_container, that would be helpful.
We do have the exact same approach to launching RStudio (Server) as everyone else, so our code is not necessarily that useful to you, but here is the RStudio (Server) app. As you may notice, it was based on OSC/bc_osc_rstudio_server, and is quite outdated since the repo mirroring no longer seems to work. Our Singularity recipes for the R environment can be found here. The VNC app using vnc_container can be found here (see submit.yml.erb for the vnc_container specific stuff).
Is your goal to run the (containerized) desktop version of RStudio (i.e. RStudio Desktop) inside a VNC session, and not RStudio Server?