ShinyProxy Configuration Examples

ShinyProxy can be configured to run in very different scenarios. Consider the following:

• For your first tryout, maybe you just want to use a single machine with a Java runtime and a docker daemon, and run java -jar shinyproxy.jar. And that's perfectly fine!

• But then you'd like to place ShinyProxy inside a container itself, because then you don't need to install a Java runtime on the host...

• And next up is a bigger deployment, where you cannot rely on a single docker host but instead need a load-balanced cluster to guarantee enough containers are available for all your users.

• Not wanting to create a single point of failure, you also deploy multiple instances of ShinyProxy, load-balanced by a nginx front server.

As you can see, the configuration of ShinyProxy and its surrounding environment can quickly grow from trivial to not-so-trivial! This repository offers some ready-to-use examples for various setups. Each example folder contains several configuration files, and an instructional README that explains how to go from a download to a running setup.

Available Examples

This repository contains examples that are divided by several categories, explained below.

Standalone vs containerized

In a standalone setup, ShinyProxy runs as a Java process on the host. In a containerized setup, ShinyProxy runs inside a container.

Docker engine vs docker swarm vs kubernetes

The term docker engine refers to a single, non-clustered docker installation. The engine is managed by a 'docker daemon', a process that can be accessed by the docker commandline executable, by a HTTP URL or by a Unix socket.

Docker swarm is a layer that groups multiple docker installations in a 'swarm' that can offer clustering capabilities, including failover, load balancing, etc.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration service that can be used as an alternative to docker swarm. Several major cloud vendors such as Amazon and Google offer ready-to-use kubernetes environments.

Notes on the Examples Configuration

All examples use the simple authentication method, which defines two users:

• jack, an administrator, with the password 'password'
• jeff, a regular user, with the password 'password'

The demo applications all use the openanalytics/shinyproxy-demo image which you can pull using

sudo docker pull openanalytics/shinyproxy-demo