Containerize a R application

Prerequisites

• You have a git client. The examples in this section use a command-line based git client, but you can use any client.

Overview

This section walks you through containerizing and running a R application.

Get the sample application

The sample application uses the popular Shiny framework.

Clone the sample application to use with this guide. Open a terminal, change directory to a directory that you want to work in, and run the following command to clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/mfranzon/r-docker-dev.git

You should now have the following contents in your r-docker-dev directory.

├── r-docker-dev/
│ ├── src/
│ │ └── app.R
│ ├── src_db/
│ │ └── app_db.R
│ ├── compose.yaml
│ ├── Dockerfile
│ └── README.md

To learn more about the files in the repository, see the following:

• Dockerfile
• .dockerignore
• compose.yaml

Run the application

Inside the r-docker-dev directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:3838. You should see a simple Shiny application.

In the terminal, press ctrl+c to stop the application.

Run the application in the background

You can run the application detached from the terminal by adding the -d option. Inside the r-docker-dev directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build -d

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:3838.

You should see a simple Shiny application.

In the terminal, run the following command to stop the application.

$ docker compose down

For more information about Compose commands, see the Compose CLI reference.

Summary

In this section, you learned how you can containerize and run your R application using Docker.

Related information:

• Build with Docker guide
• Docker Compose overview

Next steps

In the next section, you'll learn how you can develop your application using containers.