Customizing sessions

Very soon, you will want to make changes to the default configuration of your interactive sessions. The default environments we provide are pretty bare-bones. If you want to have easy access to your preferred packages, some simple steps at the start of your project will get you on the way quickly.

Important files

The launch is enabled by the content in the following files in your project:

  • Dockerfile: defines the type of session and other software installed in the environment, including the renku command-line installation.

  • .gitlab-ci.yml: controls the docker build of the image based on the project’s Dockerfile.

  • requirements.txt or install.R: language-specific files controlling the libraries.

  • .renku/renku.ini: renku project configurations containing a [renku "interactive"] section.

The most basic modifications are installations of additional packages. This can be done automatically for Python and R projects if you add the packages you want to requirements.txt and install.R respectively.

Renku project configurations

When starting a new Session, most of the options can be manually changed by the user. Depending on the specific RenkuLab deployment, you can select more RAM, a higher CPU quota, etc.

Your project may even include a package with an advanced UI (like Streamlit) and you probably want to choose it as default.

It’s possible to set a default value for all these options using the project configurations stored in the .renku/renku.ini file. Once you do that, each time a user tries to start a new environment, those options will be pre-selected.

Note

Manually modifying the renku.ini file is not recommended. You can use the renku config command from a session, for example:

renku config set interactive.default_url “/tree”

We are working on adding a user-friendly solution to set default options on the project’s settings page.

What are the specific options?

You can find a comprehensive list of options on this page. Most commonly, you may want to change the default_url or set a specific image.

The first case is useful when you prefer to show a different default UI, like the standard Jupyter interface /tree, or when you need support for a different interface, like R studio /rstudio or /streamlit (not included in the standard Python template).

The image is useful when you settle on a Docker image and you don’t need to change it anymore. The benefit is particularly evident when building a new image takes a lot of time (e.g. you added big packages) or when you expect the project to be used by a lot of people over a short period of time (e.g. you use it in a presentation or a lecture).

Even if it’s common to start the environment with the default values, keep in mind that users can still change most pre-selected settings before starting a new environment (apart from the image).

Note

Mind that not all the RenkuLab deployments have the same set of options or allow to choose the same values. If no GPUs are available, setting the default number to 1 can’t work. Should this be the case, a warning will show before starting a new environment.

Dockerfile structure

The project’s Dockerfile lives in the top level of the project directory. In the default Dockerfile provided in the template, the first line is a RENKU_BASE_IMAGE argument used to feed the following FROM instruction. It specifies a versioned base docker image. We add new versions periodically, but the heart of it is the set of installations of jupyterlab/rstudio, git, and renku:

ARG RENKU_BASE_IMAGE=renku/renkulab-py:3.7-0.7.3

# or, for RStudio

ARG RENKU_BASE_IMAGE=renku/renkulab-r:4.0.0-0.7.3

The next two statements install user-specified libraries from environment.yml and requirements.txt:

# install the python dependencies
COPY requirements.txt environment.yml /tmp/
RUN conda env update -q -f /tmp/environment.yml && \
  /opt/conda/bin/pip install -r /tmp/requirements.txt && \
  conda clean -y --all && \
  conda env export -n "root"

Then we specify the renku version to be installed through pipx:

ARG RENKU_VERSION=0.12.1

You can add to this Dockerfile in any way you’d like.

Dockerfile development

Before we get into modifying Dockerfiles, if you want to know how to update the base version of your renkulab image, see Upgrading Renku.

If you’re going to make simple modifications to the Dockerfile (i.e. changing the base Docker image version number), you can use the following steps to update and re-build the image:

  1. On the project’s landing page, click the View in GitLab button in the upper righthand corner (opens a new tab by default).

  2. In GitLab, click the Repository tab in the lefthand column, which drops you into the Files tab.

  3. Click the Dockerfile out of the list of files that appears, and click Edit (top right, near the red Delete button. Don’t click the red Delete button.)

  4. Make your edits in this window.

  5. When you’re satisfied with the edits, scroll down and write a meaningful commit message (you’ll thank yourself later).

  6. Click the green Commit changes button.

You may find the official docker documentation useful during this process.

Now you have committed the changes to your Dockerfile. Since you have made a commit, the CI/CD pipeline will kick off (pre-configured for you as a renkulab-runner inside the GitLab CI/CD settings). It will attempt to rebuild your project with the new contents of your Dockerfile based on the configuration in .gitlab-ci.yml, a file at the top level of your project directory.

The contents of .gitlab-ci.yml show you that in the build stage, we pull the docker image for Renku, build our new image out of our Dockerfile with a tag relating to the commit, and push it.

Let’s monitor this process:

  1. Click the CI/CD > Jobs tab.

  2. Click the latest status that corresponds to the changes to the Dockerfile you just made (probably “running”, unless it’s already “completed” or “failed”).

This is the log file from the build process specified in the .gitlab-ci.yml file. If it succeeds, there will be a green passed status, and the end of log will be a green Job succeeded. If the build instead failed, you can use the messages in the log to determine why and hint at what you can do to fix it.

Warning

Note that the settings have been configured for this build to time out and fail after one hour. While a long running build might be indicative of a bug in your Dockerfile, it’s possible that your build might take a long time. If this is the case, you can change the limits in the project settings via the lefthand column of the GitLab interface at Settings > CI/CD > General pipelines > Timeout.

Using your new Docker image

Passing CI/CD is great, but in order to use the new image you need to (re)start your session.

To do this, go back to the Renku platform, and from the project’s landing page, first check in the Files tab that your changes to the Dockerfile are present. If not, you can force-refresh the page. Then, go to the Notebook servers tab. If you have any running notebooks, those will keep running the image which was built with the older version(s) of the Dockerfile. You can Start new server and Launch server to start a notebook with the latest image.

If the server launches, test it to make sure that the extra functionality you added in the Dockerfile is present in the container. If it is not, you can go back to the GitLab interface and continue to make changes until you are satisfied.

Looking to make more extensive modifications? Build running too long? Keep on reading through the section below.

More extensive modifications

If you want to make more extensive modifications, say ones that would require longer build times, you may wish to test the docker build on your own machine. You can follow the docker tutorial to get set up and learn how to build and test local images.

Once you have a local docker setup, you can clone your project locally (if you haven’t set up an SSH key from GitLab you’ll need to do this), make modifications to the Dockerfile, and docker build and docker run to test your changes. To test whether your docker image will work, try running it with:

docker run --rm -ti -p 8888:8888 <image> jupyter lab --ip=0.0.0.0

Warning

You need to install jupyter and jupyterhub into the image to be able to start notebook servers on renkulab.io.

You can commit these changes and push to the repo. Then, follow the rest of the steps in Dockerfile development.

Note that by default there are two choices for the Dockerfile (chosen at project creation time via “python base” or “R base”) for the base image, located here:

These two images are available on dockerhub.

If you can’t work with the template Dockerfile provided, you can pull one of these base Dockerfile s and add the renku, git, and jupyter parts to another base image that you might have.

Getting Help

If you are stuck with a specific modification you’d like to make, do reach out to the Renku community forum!