Add Docker in installation methods

[antoinerg]

I think we should advertise our Docker images in the installation methods as Docker is getting more and more popular and should solve all the problems related to missing dependencies or misconfiguration.

[etpinard]

Good idea! We could either upload a docker image for each of our releases alongside the mac/windows/linux executables:

or just provide a link to quay,io (are those public links?) in the README.

cc #178

[austinbutler]

Having it available in the Docker Hub would be great. I saw the somewhat convoluted possible install options in the README and at first thought those were the only options. Then I noticed there's a Dockerfile in the deployment folder in this repo, but even then since it's not documented figured it wouldn't be good to rely on it.

[etpinard]

Good point by @antoinerg in #190

For #187, we may want to write a new Dockerfile aimed at offline use without streambed plotly.js but the public bundle.

where I'd say we should add another Dockerfile!

[antoinerg]

Having it available in the Docker Hub would be great.

@austinbutler Is there something special about Docker Hub or would any other Docker registries fit your needs? We were thinking of using quay.io instead. You can pull from it the same way you pull from Docker Hub.

[austinbutler]

Quay would be fine, too. But in terms of visibility Docker Hub is just where I default to when looking for images.

[antoinerg]

where I'd say we should add another Dockerfile!

Ok, I'll make a new one. Can we start it from the most recent LTS version of Ubuntu (which is newer than the current https://github.com/plotly/orca/blob/master/deployment/Dockerfile)?

If so, I could reuse the ones I made many when I worked on delivering reproducible OpenGL
and published a Docker image here: https://hub.docker.com/r/antoinerg/orca-reproducible.

[etpinard]

Can we start it from the most recent LTS version of Ubuntu

yes please.

I could reuse the ones I made many when I worked on delivering

sure.

[PedroRegisPOAR]

I would love to see Docker images to run this!

I have a question, @antoinerg I am not sure if I am in the right place, but as an user I would love to use full plotly.py functionalities, that includes orca, in an Docker image. Who may provide a way to do this? The plotly.py or the orca repository?

I guess that for most users, like me, would expect to have a way do install all plotly.py stuff, that includes orca, from a Python official base image. Is here the right place to talk about this?

I think if orca provide a way to build an image it is going to help to build a image for all plotly.py stuff.

I have been trying to do so for some time (many hours spent), but no luck. And while searching to see if someone has done a image, I could find many people trying to do that and failing too. A list of some links that I've saved:

From plotly community:
Plotly-Orca and Docker
Error to locate Orca

From stackoverflow:
Docker and Plotly
How to Build a Docker Python Image with Plotly?

From a russian guy: R plotly orca

An interesting image that I found is this for the R stuff (I am not R user so is not clear to me what that image does).

[gpernelle]

Are there already some documents that could help build a docker image than runs python plotly and orca?
Or a docker image already built?

[scjody]

I just became aware of this issue. 👋

https://quay.io/repository/plotly/image-exporter?tab=info is a public Quay repo that holds Orca images for every successful CircleCI test-and-push (one is attempted on every push to this GitHub repo). This is, and was always intended to be public.

We should probably rename the repo to avoid confusion (this project wasn't always called "orca"), but other than that is there anything else needed here?

[antoinerg]

We should probably rename the repo to avoid confusion (this project wasn't always called "orca"),

I agree

, but other than that is there anything else needed here?

As of right now, our Docker images quay.io/plotly/image-exporter:master have an entrypoing that starts an Orca server that can be queried using a simple HTTP API. That's very cool and we should advertise that this feature is available today.

However, I think we should also support running Orca as a command-line tool as it does in a normal desktop installation. For example, a user should be able to bind-mount a folder and run the equivalent of orca graph:

$ docker run -i -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) \
 antoinerg/orca-reproducible graph --verbose myfigure.json
exported myfigure, in 1158.483293 ms

or pipe the figure to the STDIN of the process

cat myfigure.json | docker run -i antoinerg/orca-reproducible graph --verbose > myfigure.png

To make this happen, we would need to slightly modify the Dockerfile's ENTRYPOINT to enable both use cases.

cc @scjody

[cedricyau]

@antoinerg Thanks for uploading the antoinerg/orca-reproducible Docker Image to DockerHub. By any chance, have you published the DockerFile anywhere? I found it really useful to get around all my Ubuntu Server installation issues and would like to see if I could use it load JSON and publish images to S3 with AWS Batch.