RCloud: Collaborative Visualisation and Analytics Platform

RCloud is an open-source environment for collaboratively creating and sharing data analyses. RCloud lets you mix analytics code in R, Python, shell, Markdown, HTML and other languages and systems. Its focus is on collaboration, discoverability and scalability. It also provides flexible platform for visualisations and dashboards. It is highly modular, ranging from a single container to full-scale enterprise deployment on large clusters.

Installation

The easiest way to get started is to use our release "full" tar balls which include all artifacts and dependencies - see README.md in the release or README-release.md for the most recent one.

Development

This version of RCloud provides an updated and reproducible build system to make it easier to develop and test enhancements to RCloud as well as to deploy it.

Quick start: Zig build

First, install Zig version 0.14.0 or later and all system requirements needed to build.

Alternatively, if you have the Nix package manager installed:

nix develop

Then:

zig build

The build will complete in about 3 minutes. Then:

cd zig-out
conf/start2

# to stop the servers:
conf/stop

Install Zig

NOTE: this step can be skipped if you use the Docker Compose build instead.

The build system requires Zig version 0.14.0 or later. You can download it from Ziglang or use the provided download script which is used to build our Docker container. The script must be run from the project root directory, because the download script expects a zig/ subdirectory to already exist from your current working directory:

zig/download.sh 0.14.0

This will download and extract the latest 0.14.0 pre-release build and install it in the zig/ directory. You can add that directory to your path, or simply run the zig executable by specifying its full path. Zig will find its library based on the executable's location, not your path.

Quick start: Docker compose

A multi-container version of RCloud incorporating all the key components can be built and run using docker compose. This is currently the preferred way to test RCloud.

Build the images:

docker compose build

Run the images:

docker compose up

To stop the containers, send a Control-C. To edit code and see the effects, save the edits, then perform docker compose build and docker compose up again. To clean up images (but not data), perform docker compose down.

Data is persisted between sessions within Docker volumes. The docker compose configuration can be examined at compose.yaml.

Maintainer concerns

Preparing an offline build

1. Complete a zig build as usual. This step will add an assets directory to zig-out.
2. Run zig build dist-fat -Dassets=zig-out/assets. This will generate a tarball rcloud-full-{version}.tar.gz in zig-out.
3. Transfer the file to another machine and extract it there.
4. Run zig build -Dassets=zig-out/assets to build without a network.

Note that you will need Zig (as well as all system requirements) on the offline machine since you are still building from source. Simply packing the zig/ directory and unpacking it on the other machine is sufficient to have a working Zig installation.

Preparing a source distribution

zig build dist

This will create zig-out/rcloud-{version}.tar.gz.

Updating R dependencies

The build system automatically discovers new R package dependencies by recursively walking the top-level package directories and examining the DESCRIPTION files. It then queries the configured package repositories for the latest versions available which satisfy any version constraints expressed in the package definitions.

zig build update

will perform this process and rewrite build-aux/config.json. If any package has been updated or added, its hash will initially be set to the empty string. The first time zig build is run, a warning will be echoed to the console to indicate that the hash is being updated.