Quickstart on a Linux server
- Make sure you have at least 20GB disk space free and Docker installed.
- Run
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc- Wait a few minutes for the image to pull, decompress and the container to start, then visit https://localhost.
For other operating systems and way more details, see below.
Run CoCalc for free for a small group on your own server!
This is a free open-source multiuser CoCalc server that you can very easily install on your own computer or server using Docker. If you need something to install on a cluster of servers using Kubernetes, see cocalc-kubernetes.
LICENSE AND SUPPORT:
- Much of this code is licensed under the AGPL condition to the commons clause exception. If you would instead like a business-friendly MIT license instead, please contact help@cocalc.com, and we will sell you a 1-year license for $999, which includes some support (you can pay more for significant support). We do have several happy paying customers as of September 2020, and cocalc-docker is very popular.
- Join the CoCalc Docker mailing list for news, updates and more.
- CoCalc mailing list for general community support.
SECURITY STATUS:
- This is not blatantly insecure from outside attack: the database has a long random password, user accounts are separate, encrypted SSL communication is used by default, etc.
- That said, a determined user with an account can easily access or change files of other users in the same container! Open ports are exposed to users for reading/writing to project files, these can be used by authenticated users for accessing any other project's open files. Requests should only connect to the main hub process, which proxies traffic to the raw server with an auth key created by the project's secret key changing on every project startup, see Issue 45. Also see the related issues for adding a user auth token to all requests required for each separate sub module, including JupyterLab server Issue 46 and classical Jupyter in an iframe Issue 47.
- There is no quota on project resource usage, so users could easily crash the server both intentionally or accidentally by running arbitrary code, and could also overflow the storage container by creating excessive files.
- Use this for personal use, behind a firewall, or with an account creation token, so that only other people you trust create accounts. Don't make one of these publicly available with important data in it and no account creation token! See issue 2031. Basically, use this only with people you trust.
- See the open docker-related CoCalc issues.
Install Docker on your computer (e.g., apt-get install docker.io on Ubuntu). Make sure you have at least 20GB disk space free, then type:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
wait a few minutes for the image to pull, decompress and the container to start, then visit https://localhost. (If you are using Microsoft Windows, instead open https://host.docker.internal/.) It is expected that you'll see a "Your connection is not private" warning, since you haven't set up a security certificate. Click "Show advanced" and "Proceed to localhost (unsafe)".
NOTES:
-
This Docker image only supports 64-bit Intel.
-
If you get an error about the Docker daemon, instead run
sudo docker .... -
CoCalc will NOT work over insecure port 80. A previous version of these directions suggested using -p 80:80 above and visiting http://localhost, which will not work.
-
If you are using Microsoft Windows, instead make a docker volume and use that for storage:
docker volume create cocalc-volume docker run --name=cocalc -d -v cocalc-volume:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc -
IMPORTANT: If you are deploying CoCalc for use over the web (so not just on localhost), it is probably necessary to obtain a valid security certificate instead of using the self-signed unsafe one that is in your Docker container. See this discussion.
-
If you are using Ubuntu as a host and would like the CoCalc instance to use your host's time and timezone, you can amend the run command as follows, which will use your host's timezone and localtime files inside the container:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -v "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone" -v "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime" -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
The above command will first download the image, then start CoCalc, storing your data in the directory ~/cocalc on your computer. If you want to store your worksheets and edit history elsewhere, change ~/cocalc to something else. Once your local CoCalc is running, open your web browser to https://localhost. (If you are using Microsoft Windows, instead open https://host.docker.internal/.)
The docker container is called cocalc and you can refer to the container and use commands like:
$ docker stop cocalc
$ docker start cocalc
You can watch the logs:
$ docker logs cocalc -f
However, these logs sometimes don't work. In that case get a bash shell in the terminal and look at the logs using tail:
$ docker exec -it cocalc bash
$ tail -f /var/log/hub.log
If you want cocalc-docker to serve everything with a custom base path, e.g., at https://example.com/my/base/path set the BASE_PATH environment variable:
docker run -e BASE_PATH=/my/base/path --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalcYou can change the base without having to change anything inside the image; what base path is used is entirely controlled by that environment variable.
Projects will stop by default if they are idle for 30 minutes. Admins can manually increase this for any project. If you want to completely disable the idle timeout functionality, set the COCALC_NO_IDLE_TIMEOUT environment variable. Note that the user interface will still show an idle timeout -- it's just that it will have no impact.
docker run -e COCALC_NO_IDLE_TIMEOUT=yes --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalcIf you're running multiple sites from a single server using an Nginx reverse proxy, a setup like the following could be useful.
Instead of mapping port 443 on the container to 443 on the host, map 443 on the container to an arbitray unused port on the host, e.g. 9090:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 9090:443 sagemathinc/cocalcIn your nginx sites-available folder, create a file like the following called e.g. mycocalc:
map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
default upgrade;
'' close;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name mycocalc.com;
#These need to be obtained independently for example from https://letsencrypt.org/, by running "certbot certonly" on the docker host after DNS is setup
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/mycocalc.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mycocalc.com/privkey.pem;
location / {
# push traffic through the proxy to the port you mapped above, in this case 9090, on the localhost:
proxy_pass https://localhost:9090;
# this enables proxying for websockets, which cocalc uses extensively:
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}
}
And soft-link it to your sites-enabled folder, e.g. sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mycocalc /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mycocalc
If you're using certbot and letsencrypt, you can then get a certificate for your domain using something like sudo certbot --nginx and selecting "mycocalc.com", which will automatically set up an ssl cert and modify your nginx server file.
It is critical that the Docker container have the correct time, since CoCalc assumes that the server has the correct time.On a laptop running Docker under MacOS, the clock may get messed up any time you suspend/resume your laptop. This workaround might work for you: https://github.com/arunvelsriram/docker-time-sync-agent/.
There are no apple Silicon binaries yet. However, assuming you have Rosetta2 installed, the x86_64 Docker image will halfway work. You can start it up, and do many things (e.g., run a Julia kernel in Jupyter). However starting Sage fails as you can see in a terminal:
~$ sage
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SageMath version 9.3, Release Date: 2021-05-09 │
│ Using Python 3.8.5. Type "help()" for help. │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
cysignals sigaltstack: Invalid argumentI assume this is an issue with emulation. If you aren't using Sage this might be OK. This issue is being tracked here.
Cocalc-docker by default uses a self signed certificate on localhost. Chrome and Safari won't even let you connect. However, with Firefox you can click through some warnings and use CoCalc-docker just fine. So you must uses Firefox when running CoCalc-docker locally on MacOS.
You can run CoCalc locally on your Chromebook as long as it supports Crostini Linux.
-
Install (Crostini) Linux support -- search for Linux in settings and enable.
-
In the Linux terminal, type
sudo su apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get install tmux dpkg-dev -
Install Docker as here:
sudo su apt-get install -y \ apt-transport-https \ ca-certificates \ curl \ gnupg2 \ software-properties-common && \ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | apt-key add - && \ apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88 && \ add-apt-repository \ "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \ $(lsb_release -cs) \ stable" && \ apt-get update && apt-get install -y docker-ce -
Install cocalc-docker:
sudo docker run --name=cocalc -d -v /cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 -p 80:80 sagemathinc/cocalcType
/sbin/ifconfig eth0|grep inetin the terminal, and use whatever ip address is listed there -- e.g., for me it was https://100.115.92.198/
If you're running this docker image on a remote server and want to use ssh port forwarding to connect, type:
ssh -L 8080:localhost:443 username@remote_server
then open your web browser to https://localhost:8080
For enhanced security, make the container only listen on localhost:
docker stop cocalc
docker rm cocalc
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 127.0.0.1:443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
Then the only way to access your CoCalc server is to type the following on your local computer:
ssh -L 8080:localhost:443 username@remote_server
and open your web browser to https://localhost:8080
Instead of doing:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
do this:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 -p <your ip address>:2222:22 sagemathinc/cocalc
Then you can do:
ssh projectid@<your ip address> -p 2222
Note that project_id is the hex id string for the project without hyphens. One way to show project id in this format is to open a .term file in the project and run this command: (This only works in CoCalc in Docker; USER is set differently in production CoCalc.)
echo $USER
To use SSH key authentication with the Docker container, have your private key file in the usual place in the host computer, for example ~/.ssh/.id_cocalc, and copy the matching public key into your project's home directory. For example, you could do the following in a .term in your project:
cd
mkdir .ssh
chmod 700 .ssh
vi .ssh/authorized_keys
... paste in contents of ~/.ssh/id_cocalc.pub from host computer ...
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
Get a bash shell insider the container, then connect to the database and make a user (me!) an admin as follows:
$ sudo docker exec -it cocalc bash
root@17fecb49c5c2:/# cd /cocalc/src/scripts
root@17fecb49c5c2:/cocalc/src/scripts# ./make-user-admin wstein@gmail.com
UPDATE 1Obviously, you should really make the user you created (with its email address) an admin, not me!Refresh your browser, and then you should see an extra admin tab and the top of your browser window; you can also open any project by directly visiting its URL, and change the idle timeout and always running settings. In the Admin tab you can search for users, impersonate any user, ban users, configure dozens of things about CoCalc, send a notification that all signed in users see, and more. One thing admin users can't do is get a root shell -- for that you have to use sudo docker exec -it cocalc bash (of course, CoCalc is just Ubuntu linux, so you could make it so a specific project can become root via sudo).
Note that the make-user-admin script is in /cocalc/src/scripts. Take a look at it:
root@17fecb49c5c2:/cocalc/src/scripts# more ./make-user-admin
...
echo "update accounts set groups='{admin}' where email_address='$1'" | psqlAs you can see, aside from some error checking, the entire script is just a 1-line PostgreSQL query.If you know basic SQL, you can very easily do all kinds of interesting things.If you type psql as root, you'll get the PostgreSQL shell connected to the database for CoCalc.Type \d to see the tables, and \d tablename for more about a particular table. For example,typing \d accounts shows all the fields in the accounts table, and groups is one of them.Here's where in the source code ofCoCalc itself all of these database tables are defined. In any case, being aware of all this can be very helpfulif you want to do some batch action, e.g., :
- delete all accounts that are old or inactive
- query to get the status of projects or accounts
You can also make it so that running sudo su in a CoCalc terminal allows a project to gain root access. First as above, from outside of CoCalc, dodocker exec -it cocalc bash, then type visudo:
$ docker exec -it cocalc bash
root@931045eda11f:/# visudo
Then run this echo command, but replace 0630f773c01847e79c0863c0118fe0de by the project id with all dashes removed:
echo '0630f773c01847e79c0863c0118fe0de ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers
Alternatively, you can get the username by typing whoami in a terminal from the project:
~$ whoami
0630f773c01847e79c0863c0118fe0de
After the above echo command, go to a terminal in your project and try sudo su:
~$ sudo su
root@121119037fd4:/projects/0630f773-c018-47e7-9c08-63c0118fe0de# ls /root
run.py
Bam, you're root!
NOTE: A project having sudo access is completely unrelated to a user in CoCAlc being an admin. Neither implies the the other.
NOTE: You can also use visudo to edit the file (which is better), or EDITOR=emacs visudo to edit it using emacs.
WARNING: Obviously having a user able to run as root in a Docker container introduces additional security issues.
Sign in as a user that is an admin (see the previous section above). Click on the Admin tab at the top, search for the user, and then click the "Password" toggle, and click "Request Password Reset Link...".
This does NOT set the password. It just makes a password reset link, which you send your user via some communications channel that works. You may need this because:
- You do not have email setup. It is possible to setup Sendgrid so your cocalc-docker image sends out email, but we haven't documented that yet...
- You have email setup, but it sometimes fails for users with aggressive spam filtering.
After making your main account an admin as above, search for " Registration Tokens" in the Admin tab. Create one or more tokens and share them with people who you want to use your server. Nobody else will be able to make an account.
If docker exec -it cocalc bash doesn't seem to give you the right terminal height, e.g. content is only displayed in the uppper part of the terminal, this workaround may help when launching bash:
docker exec -e COLUMNS="`tput cols`" -e LINES="`tput lines`" -it cocalc bash
More information on this issue is in moby issue 33794.
In order to build and run CoCalc on an SELinux box, first set SELinux to permissive:
$ setenforce 0
Tell docker and SELinux to "play nicely":
$ chcon -Rt svirt_sandbox_file_t cocalc
return SELinux to enabled:
$ setenforce 1
-- via discussion
If you started the container as above, there will be a directory ~/cocalc on your host computer that contains all data and files related to your projects and users -- go ahead and verify that it is there before upgrading. It might look like this:
Williams-MacBook-Pro:~ wstein$ ls cocalc
be889c14-dc96-4538-989b-4117ffe84148 postgres conf
The directory postgres contains the database files, so all projects, users, file editing history, etc. The directory conf contains some secrets and log files. There will also be one directory (like be889c14-dc96-4538-989b-4117ffe84148) for each project that is created.
To get the newest image, do this (which will take some time):
docker pull sagemathinc/cocalc
Once done, you can delete and recreate your CoCalc container: (This will not delete any of your project or user data, which you confirmed above is in ~/cocalc.)
docker stop cocalc
docker rm cocalc
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
Now visit https://localhost to see your upgraded server.
The CoCalc Docker images at Docker Hub contain a subset of all the software in at cocalc.com. At present, the images are about 12 GB while the cloud service has hundreds of GB of packages and libraries.
Suppose you'd like to add software to your local CoCalc instance after installing and starting the Docker container. Here's an example of how to add an install of texlive-full, in case you need more than the minimal texlive installation in the published image:
The Docker image is Ubuntu 18.04. You can do
sudo docker exec -it [container name] bash
to become root in the container, then do
apt-get install texlive-full
to install the package.
Note that the texlive-full package is over 3 GB. So you will need the additional disk space to install it, and it could take several minutes to over an hour to install, depending on your connection to the internet and the speed of your computer.
Additional notes:
- Be sure to type
umask 022first before you install software if you are using a method other thanapt-get. This step is needed to ensure that permissions are set properly. The default umask is 007. If you usepip3orpip2without setting the umask to 022, the package gets installed, but it is not visible to normal users as a result. - Most instructions for adding packages to Ubuntu 18.04 should work for CoCalc-Docker, for example
pip installfor Python 2 packages, andpip3 installfor Python 3 packages. - Whenever you upgrade your CoCalc image from Docker Hub as described in Upgrade above, you will need to repeat the above steps.
This section is for CoCalc developers.
Build the image:
make build-full # or make build
Run the image (to test):
make run
How I pushed this:
docker tag smc:latest sagemathinc/cocalc
docker login --username=sagemathinc
docker push sagemathinc/cocalc
Also to build at a specific commit:
docker build --build-arg commit=121b564a6b08942849372b9ffdcdddd7194b3e89 -t smc .
This section assuming that your docker host has a GPUs and the nvidia-docker2 runtime is installed properly. For more information please see the NVIDIA Container Toolkit project.
Test of the docker with GPUs support should give a similar output:
(base) [root@gput401 cocalc-docker]# docker run --runtime=nvidia -e NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all --rm nvidia/cuda:latest nvidia-smi
Tue Jun 16 17:52:16 2020
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.64.00 Driver Version: 440.64.00 CUDA Version: 10.2 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 Tesla T4 Off | 00000000:00:06.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 31C P0 16W / 70W | 0MiB / 15109MiB | 0% Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
If the test running w/o problems, you can start to rebuild your own cocalc docker image with tensorflow support:
cp Dockerfile Dockerfile.gpu
Simply change first line in the Dockerfile.gpu
#FROM ubuntu:18.04
FROM tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu
Rebuild your image:
docker build -t cocalc-gpu -f Dockerfile.gpu .
Run it:
docker run -it --runtime=nvidia -e NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all --name=cocalc-gpu -d -v ~/cocalc_test:/projects -p 443:443 -p 0.0.0.0:2222:22 --rm cocalc-gpu bash