Create custom applications

Prior reading: Cloud environments overview

Purpose: This document provides detailed instructions for creating a new custom app definition.

Introduction

Workbench allows users to run their custom applications on GCE instances for GCP-based Workbench workspaces. Visual Studio Code and R Analysis Environment are shown as examples to help you get started running your own applications. Workbench uses development containers to support app configuration and management. The Development Container Specification for examples in Workbench can be found in the workbench-app-devcontainers repository.

Dev containers

Dev containers stands for “development containers.” Workbench runs your apps in an isolated container in a VM. To define an app with a dev container, you must create a .devcontainer.json file.

Containerized apps

.devcontainer.json supports Docker images, Dockerfiles, and Docker Compose. To customize your container with Dockerfile or Docker Compose, see Using Images, Dockerfiles, and Docker Compose.

Dev Container Features

Besides Docker, Dev Container Features is a powerful dev container tool for adding tools and libraries into your containers. Here is a list of available features.

You can clone over the R Analysis Environment app example definition from workbench-app-devcontainers and then add your custom features. For example, if you want to add RShiny packages into R Analysis Environment, you can install the R packages through devcontainer-features/r-packages feature.

"features": {
        "ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/r-packages:1": {
            "packages": "shiny,shinydashboard",
            "installSystemRequirements": true
        }
    }

Create your own app with dev containers

If you want to create your own custom applications, the simplest way is to modify the Workbench template. Alternatively, see devcontainers/templates for more dev container templates. If you choose to use these templates, there are some Workbench specific requirements that you must satisfy:

1. The app must be running on app-network.
2. The app port is exposed on localhost.
3. If you want to sync the workspace bucket files to your working directory, set --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --device /dev/fuse --security-opt apparmor:unconfined to the Docker container.

Publish your custom app to Git

You must publish your custom app dev container to a public Git repository for Workbench to reference it. For examples of a custom app dev container, see Devcontainer for R Analysis.

Launching a custom app in Verily Workbench

To launch the app from the Verily Workbench UI, see detailed instructions in Use cloud environments.