Build Once, Run Anywhere:

Making Your Research Reproducible with Docker

An introduction to containers for research software: what Docker images are, how they solve dependency problems, and how to write Dockerfiles that make notebooks, scripts, and data workflows reproducible and shareable. Includes worked examples of volumes, networking, and the commands to run and manage containers.

July 2025

Özgün Balaban

Speaker

Özgün Balaban

This Coding Café session focused on how Docker helps researchers create reproducible environments for notebooks, scripts, and data workflows.

Topics covered:

  • Software dependency issues and “dependency hell”
  • What containers and container images are
  • Docker’s role in research reproducibility
  • Practical examples of Dockerfiles, volumes, and networking
  • Step-by-step commands to run and manage containers

This session was designed to be accessible to researchers with basic command-line experience and aims to promote the use of containerization for reproducible and shareable research workflows.

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