"no Docker image" for forked project

Hello! I seem to have a problem with forking my project. Would love some help.

  • I am able to start an RStudio session for the project normally, here.

  • But once I fork it (e.g. here), it seems I can’t start a session for the forked project. I am first told that no Docker image is available. And then if click on “Start with base image”, I get a 404 code when the session starts.

Might you know where to look to fix this?

Hi there!

Thank you for reaching out. What you described is known behaviour. When you fork a project the Docker image is not automatically built. To initiate the build, you can simply push any commit to the repository which will kick it off. For example, you can put a commit to the README.md file using the Web IDE of GitLab.

Give that a go and let us know how it goes.

Thank you very much, Gavin! This did the trick.

Could you point me to the documentation I missed on this?

I am also wondering if this behavior is avoidable? (I see for example this video: Forking and starting a Renkulab interactive environment - YouTube where a commit was not necessary to build an image.)

I am part of a team that is building some R courses for beginners and we are pitching Renku to the students as a “start coding immediately!” alternative to installing software locally. The process of opening GitLab, editing, then committing, while quite straightforward, actually ends up doubling the number of steps the students have to go through to actually start coding.

Would be great if there were a way to bypass this(?)

Have you looked at the option of pinning an image? This would generally remove the need for an image build pipeline to run on the forked projects. For teaching use-cases this is often the way to go.

Thank you very much! I will look into this and report back.

Thank you again. Pinning did the trick

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