One of cjr’s main goals is to allow anyone to easily work with many different Linux environments and software packages. We use the name stack to describe a Linux distribution and all the software that is installed on it. For example, you can have a stack that is based on Ubuntu and has python and Jupyter lab installed.
You can make your own stacks or use stacks made by other users. Here we briefly introduce two types of stacks. If you want to learn more about stacks later, then there is a separate tutorial that is dedicated to this topic.
In this quick-start guide we will use an official cjr stack named fedora-sc (short for fedora scientific computing). The configuration for this stack is stored in the cjr official repository. You download the stack by running the command
$ cjr stack:pull https://github.com/container-job-runner/fedora-sc.git
Cjr will use git to copy the stack files from the repository into your stack directory (by default it’s set to ~/.config/cjr/) You can view a list of all your current stacks by running the command
$ cjr stack:ls
Next let’s manually build the stack with the command
$ cjr stack:build fedora-sc
This command may take a few minutes to complete. Cjr normally handles building automatically, however, we are running the build manually so that the rest of the commands in this guide will run immediately.
Advanced Users: If you are familiar with Docker, then cjr stacks are simply directories that contain Dockerfiles, build artifacts, run artifacts, and other configuration files. Click here to read technical details about stacks and stack creation.
The simplest kinds of stacks are actually pre-made images from repositories like Docker Hub. Docker Hub is Docker’s official website for storing container images. It contains a large number of official images for running various open-source projects. You can also find official container images for a many linux distriubutions such as fedora and ubuntu.
We will try using using these images later in the tutorial. For now, we will focus on the fedora-sc stack.