Docker Setup
Quickstart: install and run the Docker image
Begin by installing Docker for your OS. Then, to get the SynapseML image and run it, open a terminal (PowerShell/cmd on Windows) and run
docker run -it -p 8888:8888 mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
In your browser, go to http://localhost:8888/ —you'll see the Docker image
EULA, and once you accept it, the Jupyter notebook interface will start. To
skip this step, add -e ACCEPT_EULA=yes
to the Docker command:
docker run -it -p 8888:8888 -e ACCEPT_EULA=y mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
You can now select one of the sample notebooks and run it, or create your own.
Note: The EULA is needed only for running the SynapseML Docker image; the source code is released under the MIT license (see the LICENSE file).
Running a specific version
In the preceding docker command, mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
specifies the project and image name that you
want to run. There's another component implicit here: the tsag (=
version) that you want to use. Specifying it explicitly looks like
mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release:1.0.7
for the 1.0.7
tag.
Leaving mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
by itself has an implicit latest
tag, so it's
equivalent to mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release:latest
. The latest
tag is identical to the
most recent stable SynapseML version. You can see the current [synapsemltags] on
our Docker Hub repository.
A more practical example
The previous section had a rather simplistic command. A more complete command that you'll probably want to use can look as follows:
docker run -it --rm \
-p 127.0.0.1:80:8888 \
-v ~/myfiles:/notebooks/myfiles \
mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release:1.0.7
In this example, backslashes are for readability; you
can enter the command as one long line if you like. In PowerShell, the myfiles
local
path and line breaks looks a little different:
docker run -it --rm `
-p 127.0.0.1:80:8888 `
-v C:\myfiles:/notebooks/myfiles `
mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release:1.0.7
Let's break this command and go over the meaning of each part:
-it
This command uses a combination of
-i
and-t
(which could also be specified as--interactive --tty
). Combining these two flags means that the image is running interactively, which in this example means that you can see messages that the server emits, and it also makes it possible to useCtrl+C
to shut down the Jupyter notebook server.--rm
When Docker runs any image, it creates a container to hold any further filesystem data for files that were created or modified. If you ran the above quickstart command, you can see the container that is left behind with
docker container list -a
. You can reclaim such containers with `docker container rm`, or reclaim all containers from stopped run with `docker container prune`, or even more generally, reclaim all unused Docker resources with `docker system prune`. Back to
--rm
: this flag tells Docker to discard the image when the image exits, which means that any data created while running the image is discarded when the run is done. But see the description of the-v
flag.-e ACCEPT_EULA=y
The
-e
flag is used to set environment variables in the running container. In this case, we use it to bypass the EULA check. More flags can be added for other variables, for example, you can add a-e MMLSPARK_JUPYTER_PORT=80
to change the port that the Jupyter server listens to.-p 127.0.0.1:80:8888
The Jupyter server in the SynapseML image listens to port 8888, but that is normally isolated from the actual network. Previously, we have used
-p 8888:8888
to say that we want to map port 8888 (LHS) on our actual machine to port 8888 (RHS) in the container. One problem with this is that8888
might be hard to remember, but a more serious problem is that your machine now serves the Jupyter interface to any one on your network.This more complete example resolves these issues: we replaced
8888:8888
with80:8888
so HTTP port 80 goes to the container's running Jupyter (making just http://localhost/ work); and we also added a127.0.0.1:
prefix to make the Jupyter inteface available only from your own machine rather than the whole network.You can repeat this flag to forward additional ports similarly. For example, you can expose some of the Spark ports, for example:
-p 127.0.0.1:4040:4040
.-v ~/myfiles:/notebooks/myfiles
As described earlier, we're using
--rm
to remove the container when the run exits, which is usually fine since pulling out files from these containers can be a little complicated. Instead, we use the -v flag to map a directory from your machine (the~/myfiles
on the LHS) to a directory that is available inside the running container. Any modifications to this directory that are done by the Docker image are performed directly on the actual directory.The local directory follows the local filename conventions, so on Windows you'd use a Windows-looking path. On Windows, you also need to share the drive you want to use in the Docker settings.
The path on the right side is used inside the container and it's therefore a Linux path. The SynapseML image runs Jupyter in the
/notebooks
directory, so it's a good place for making your files available conveniently.This flag can be used more than once, to make several directories available in the running container. Both paths must be absolute, so if you want to specify a path relatively, you can use something like
-v $PWD/myfiles:/notebooks/myfiles
.With such directory sharing in place, you can create/edit notebooks, and code in notebooks can use the shared directory for additional data, for example:
data = spark.read.csv('myfiles/mydata.csv')
...
model.write().overwrite().save('myfiles/myTrainedModel.mml')mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release:1.0.7
Finally, this argument specifies an explicit version tag for the image that we want to run.
Running the container as a server
An alternative to running the Docker image interactively with -it
is running
it in a "detached" mode, as a server, using the -d
(or --detach
) flag.
A second flag that may be useful here is --name
, which gives a convenient
label to the running image:
docker run -d --name my-synapseml ...flags... mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
When running in this mode, you can use
docker stop my-synapseml
: to stop the imagedocker start my-synapseml
: to start it againdocker logs my-synapseml
: to see the log output it produced
Running other commands in an active container
Another useful docker
command is exec
, which runs a command in the context
of an existing active container. To use it, you specify the container name
and the command to run. For example, with an already running detached container
named my-synapseml, you can use
docker exec -it my-synapseml bash
to start a shell in the context of the server, roughly equivalent to starting a terminal in the Jupyter interface.
Other common Linux executables can be used, for example:
docker exec -it my-synapseml top
docker exec my-synapseml ps auxw
(ps
doesn't need -it
since it's not an interactive command.)
These commands can be used with interactive containers too, and --name
can be
used to make them easy to target. If you don't use --name
, Docker assigns a
random name to the container; you can use docker ps
to see it. You can
also get the container IDs to use instead of names.
Remember that the command given to docker exec
is running in the context of
the running container: you can only run executables that exist in the container,
and the run is subject to the same resource restrictions (FS/network access,
etc.) as the container. The SynapseML image is based on a rather basic Ubuntu
installation (the ubuntu
image from Docker Hub).
Running other Spark executables
docker run
can accept another optional argument after the image name,
specifying an alternative executable to run instead of the default launcher that
fires up the Jupyter notebook server. Using this extra argument you can use the
Spark environment directly in the container:
docker run -it ...flags... mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release bash
This command starts the container with bash instead of Jupyter. This environment
has all of the Spark executables available in its $PATH
. You still need to
specify the command-line flags that load the SynapseML package, but there are
convenient environment variables that hold the required package and repositories
to use:
pyspark --repositories "$MML_M2REPOS" --packages "$MML_PACKAGE" --master "local[*]"
Many of the above listed flags are useful in this case too, such as mapping work
directories with -v
.
Updating the SynapseML image
New releases of SynapseML are published from time to time, and they include a new
Docker image. As an image consumer, you'll normally not notice such new
versions: docker run
will download an image if a copy of it doesn't exist
locally, but if it does, then docker run
will blindly run it, without
checking for new tags that were pushed.
Hence you need to explicitly tell Docker to check for a new version
and pull it if one exists. You do so with the pull
command:
docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
Since we didn't specify an explicit tag here, docker
adds the implied
:latest
tag, and checks the available mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
image with this tag
on Docker Hub. When it finds a different image with this tag, it will fetch a
copy to your machine, changing the image that an unqualified
mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
refers to.
Docker normally knows only about the tags that it fetched, so if you've always
used mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
to refer to the image without an explicit version tag,
then you wouldn't have the version-tagged image too. Once the tag is updated,
the previous version will still be in your system, only without any tag. Using
docker images
to list the images in your system will now show you two images
for mcr.microsoft.com/mmlspark/release
, one with a tag of latest
and one with no tag, shown
as <none>
. Assuming that you don't have active containers (including detached
ones), docker system prune
will remove this untagged image, reclaiming the
used space.
If you've used an explicit version tag, then it will still exist after a new
pull, which means that you can continue using this version. If you
used an unqualified name first and then a version-tagged one, Docker will fetch
both tags. Only the second fetch is fast since it points to content that
was already loaded. In this case, doing a pull
when there's a new version
will fetch the new latest
tag and change its meaning to the newer version, but
the older version will still be available under its own version tag.
Finally, if there are such version-tagged older versions that you want to get
rid of, you can use docker images
to check the list of installed images and
their tags, and docker rmi <name>:<tag>
to remove the unwanted ones.
A note about security
Executing code in a Docker container can be unsafe if the running user is
root
. For this reason, the SynapseML image uses a proper username instead. If
you still want to run as root (for instance, if you want to apt install
an
another ubuntu package), then you should use --user root
. This mode can be useful
when combined with docker exec
to perform administrative work while the image
continues to run as usual.
Further reading
This text briefly covers some of the useful things that you can do with the SynapseML Docker image (and other images in general). You can find much more documentation online.