Develop in Container

Welcome to the world of development containers! Whether you’re a seasoned statistician or just starting your journey, development containers provide a powerful and flexible solution for creating reproducible and isolated environments for your data analysis and statistical modeling projects. With development containers, you can effortlessly set up and manage pre-configured environments that contain all the necessary dependencies, libraries, and tools, ensuring consistent results across different systems whether on your local laptop or remote server. The following tutorials provide instructions for development container setup, management, and customization.

It is enouraged to use dev containers through remote servers such as Alta.

Setup

New Users

New users or users attempting to add new machines, start here.

Basic Container Usage on a Server

Essential

This tutorial covers how to:

connect to a server like Alta
set up your project files
access Jupyterhub and RStudio
install packages
log into GitHub

Management

Containers Management

Essential

This tutorial covers:

basic container commands
starting/attaching/detaching/stopping containers

Files

This tutorial covers:

moving files around between remote and local instances
GitHub repository cloning and basic management

Jobs

This tutorial covers:

background job management
basic terminal multiplexer (tmux) usage for persistant terminal sessions
running background jobs while disconnected from server and/or container

Additional Features

Editing Dockerfile

This tutorial covers:

advanced customization of Dockerfile

GitHub Codespaces

This tutorial covers:

getting the GitHub Developer Pack
running Codespaces
using Codespaces with VS Code