If you do not use a web-based IDE (like RStudio Server, Jupyter, VSCode, etc.) with integrated graphics devices, the following additional configuration is required to display plots of R running in your container.
1 The httpgd R package
httpgd is a graphics device for R that is accessible via HTTP.
Start the httpgd server in the container that published a port, and you can access the plot viewer in your browser.
For example, you can create a container with the following command and start the httpgd server from within the R terminal.
Terminal
docker run --rm -ti -p 8000:8000 ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer/r-ver:4 RR Terminal
httpgd::hgd(host = "0.0.0.0", port = 8000)
plot(mtcars)Docker images built from the rocker-org/devcontainer-images repository are httpgd pre-installed.
For details, please check the httpgd’s vignette for Docker.
2 X11
While this approach is generic, it is often difficult to configure or perform well, especially on non-Linux operating systems.
X11 forwarding by connecting the X11 server in the container to the X11 client on the local machine.
Commands vary depending on the situation, but for example, the commands like below are used.
Terminal
docker run --rm -ti -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix <imagename> R