BARD Containers

This repository contains the container recipes for the BARD virtual desktop. BARD is built on top of the open-source project abcdesktop.

Files

System containers

The system containers in this repository (listed below) are specific to EMBL instances. However, they can be adapted for use in other environments with the necessary modifications.

Application containers

Each folder contains:

• A container recipe (a standard Docker recipe with BARD-specific configurations)
• A JSON file (generated by running docker inspect, used for deployment to BARD)
• A logo image in .svg format (representing the application’s logo, converted to a base64 string named icondata in the container recipe)

Container Descriptions

System containers

Container Name	Description
cleanup	container used as k8s cron job to automatically remove pods older than 48hrs
oc.nginx.external	front end web container for EMBL external BARD instance
oc.nginx	same as oc.nginx.external, but it is used for the EMBL internal instance
oc.user.embl	container which include basic software, dependencies for user pod
oc.user.external	same as oc..user.embl but it is used for the EMBL external instance
pyos	main controller container for the BARD desktop

Application containers

Application containers are standard docker containers with BARD specific features(for example , additional LABEL)

• The LABEL are required for the application to appear in BARD desktop.
• The base-images recipes contain dependencies such as X11 etc which are essential for BARD. It is recommended to start building your own application container from base-images.
• .json file is used for deployment of the application. After building docker container, the .json file can be created with docker inspect CONTAINER_ID
• BARD requires icons in SVG format. You can encode your .svg logo into Base64 by running:
  bash base64 example.svg Then, copy the resulting string into the LABEL oc.icondata field within the container recipe.
• The last few lines in container recipe,(e.g. those handling localaccount, passwd) are required by BARD, so that the containerized application runs under the current logged in user.

Deploy containers to BARD

1. To deploy the apps to your own instance, it follows the same procedure as the abcdesktop For example, curl -X PUT -H 'Content-type: text/javascript' https://YOUR_BARD_INSTANCE/API/manager/image [email protected] where replace fiji.json with the correct json file.
2. To request new apps, please open a PR in this repository

Citation

If you find BARD useful, and used it for your research, please cite the below.

Tischer, C., Hériché, J.-K., & Sun, Y. (2025). A Virtual Bioimage Analysis Research Desktop (BARD) for Deployment of Bioimage Tools on Kubernetes. Base4NFDI User Conference 2024 (UC4B2024), Berlin. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14643885