Voyant Docker Tutorial
Docker Desktop is needed to run Voyant Tools. Please download it from the main site here.
Hover over the above-highlighted button and select the platform you are working on. Once downloaded install and run the program.
During the first launch, you will be asked to create an account. This is optional, you do not need an account to download and run a container. For now, you can select skip to avoid the creation of an account.
You can also skip the welcome survey that comes after.
Once you come to the main dashboard you can search for the Voyant image.
Type “voyanttools/voyanttools” in the search bar, the select “pull” from the image the comes up.
Give the program a little time to process. Then click “images” in the left bar.
Once the image has completed downloading, you will see it appear as one of your local images. To run this image click the “play” button next to it.
After clicking play, click the arrow next to “Optional Settings” to get the above dialogue. For now the only setting we need to set is the “Host port”. Set it to “8080” and then click the “Run” button.
Docker will immediately send you to the running container and its logs. Ignore this output for now, and click on the URL at the top.
This will open up a web page with your copy of Voyant running.
Now, continue to use it in the same way as you would the hosted version.
To shut down the container, click on the “Containers” tab in the left column. Then find our container in the running containers list and click the “stop” button.
After doing so, the container will no longer be running.
Launching the container using the above directions does not allow the container to save any of its data. If you shut down the image, your data could be lost. In order to properly set up data storage we need to configure a “Volume”.
To do this select “Volumes” in the left columns. Then select “Create a volume”.
Finally, give your volume a memorable name and select the Create button. Remember the name, we will need it later.
Now return to the “Images” tab and press play on the image again.
Here we can set some additional properties.
To set up the volume we need to add the volume name to the “Host path” section. We also need to add the string “/voyant-data” to the container path. Both need to be set in order for the volume to work correctly.
We can also set the container name here. Setting this will give the container in the “containers” tab a name, and make it easier to recognize.
Finally, for advanced users, we can modify Java runtime options by adding environment variables in the final section. However, doing so is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
Press run when you are done.
Once complete you will see the new container in the “containers” tab.
Notice how the second container has the name that we entered during setup. It is the one with persistent storage. The other container does not and can be deleted by clicking on the trash icon on the right.
That is all for now.