Run CoCalc for free for a small group on your own server!
This is a free open-source multiuser CoCalc server that you can very easily install on your own computer or server using Docker. If you need something to install on a cluster of servers using Kubernetes, see cocalc-kubernetes.
LICENSE AND SUPPORT:
- Much of this code is licensed under the AGPL condition to the commons clause exception. If you would instead like a business-friendly MIT license instead, please contact help@cocalc.com, and we will sell you a 1-year license for $799. This also includes some support, though with no guarantees (that costs more). We do have several happy paying customers as of Sept 2019.
- Join the CoCalc Docker mailing list for news, updates and more.
- CoCalc mailing list for general community support.
SECURITY STATUS:
- This is not blatantly insecure from outside attack: the database has a long random password, user accounts are separate, encrypted SSL communication is used by default, etc.
- That said, a determined user with an account can easily access or change files of other users in the same container! Use this for personal use, behind a firewall, or with an account creation token, so that only other people you trust create accounts. Don't make one of these publicly available with important data in it and no account creation token! See issue 2031. Basically, use this only with people you trust.
- See the open docker-related CoCalc issues.
Install Docker on your computer (e.g., apt-get install docker.io on Ubuntu). Make sure you have at least 15GB disk space free, then type:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
wait a few minutes for the image to pull, decompress and the container to start, then visit https://localhost. (If you are using Microsoft Windows, instead open https://host.docker.internal/.) It is expected that you'll see a "Your connection is not private" warning, since you haven't set up a security certificate. Click "Show advanced" and "Proceed to localhost (unsafe)".
NOTES:
- This Docker image only supports 64-bit Intel.
- If you get an error about the Docker daemon, instead run
sudo docker .... - CoCalc will NOT work over insecure port 80. A previous version of these directions suggested using -p 80:80 above and visiting http://localhost, which will not work.
- If you are using Microsoft Windows, instead make a docker volume and use that for storage:
docker volume create cocalc-volume docker run --name=cocalc -d -v cocalc-volume:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc - IMPORTANT: If you are deploying CoCalc for use over the web (so not just on localhost), it is probably necessary to obtain a valid security certificate instead of using the self-signed unsafe one that is in your Docker container. See this discussion.
The above command will first download the image, then start CoCalc, storing your data in the directory ~/cocalc on your computer. If you want to store your worksheets and edit history elsewhere, change ~/cocalc to something else. Once your local CoCalc is running, open your web browser to https://localhost. (If you are using Microsoft Windows, instead open https://host.docker.internal/.)
The docker container is called cocalc and you can refer to the container and use commands like:
$ docker stop cocalc
$ docker start cocalc
You can watch the logs:
$ docker logs cocalc -f
However, these logs sometimes don't work. In that case get a bash shell in the terminal and look at the logs using tail:
$ docker exec -it cocalc bash
$ tail -f /var/log/hub.log
If you're running multiple sites from a single server using an Nginx reverse proxy, a setup like the following could be useful.
Instead of mapping port 443 on the container to 443 on the host, map 443 on the container to an arbitray unused port on the host, e.g. 9090:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 9090:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
In your nginx sites-available folder, create a file like the following called e.g. mycocalc:
server {
server_name mycocalc.com;
location / {
include proxy_params;
# push traffic through the proxy to the port you mapped above, in this case 9090, on the localhost:
proxy_pass https://localhost:9090/;
# this enables proxying for websockets, which cocalc uses extensively:
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}
listen 443 ssl;
}
And soft-link it to your sites-enabled folder, e.g. sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mycocalc /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mycocalc
If you're using certbot and letsencrypt, you can then get a certificate for your domain using something like sudo certbot --nginx and selecting "mycocalc.com", which will automatically set up an ssl cert and modify your nginx server file.
It is critical that the Docker container have the correct time, since CoCalc assumes that the server has the correct time. On a laptop running Docker under OS X, the clock may get messed up any time you suspend/resume your laptop. This workaround might work for you: https://github.com/arunvelsriram/docker-time-sync-agent/.
You can run CoCalc locally on your Chromebook as long as it supports Crostini Linux.
- Install (Crostini) Linux support -- search for Linux in settings and enable.
- In the Linux terminal, type
sudo su apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get install tmux dpkg-dev - Install Docker as here:
sudo su apt-get install -y \ apt-transport-https \ ca-certificates \ curl \ gnupg2 \ software-properties-common && \ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | apt-key add - && \ apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88 && \ add-apt-repository \ "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \ $(lsb_release -cs) \ stable" && \ apt-get update && apt-get install -y docker-ce - Install cocalc-docker:
Type
sudo docker run --name=cocalc -d -v /cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 -p 80:80 sagemathinc/cocalc/sbin/ifconfig eth0|grep inetin the terminal, and use whatever ip address is listed there -- e.g., for me it was https://100.115.92.198/
If you're running this docker image on a remote server and want to use ssh port forwarding to connect, type:
ssh -L 8080:localhost:443 username@remote_server
then open your web browser to https://localhost:8080
For enhanced security, make the container only listen on localhost:
docker stop cocalc
docker rm cocalc
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 127.0.0.1:443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
Then the only way to access your CoCalc server is to type the following on your local computer:
ssh -L 8080:localhost:443 username@remote_server
and open your web browser to https://localhost:8080
Instead of doing:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
do this:
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 -p <your ip address>:2222:22 sagemathinc/cocalc
Then you can do:
ssh projectid@<your ip address> -p 2222
Note that project_id is the hex id string for the project without hyphens. One way to show project id in this format is to open a .term file in the project and run this command: (This only works in CoCalc in Docker; USER is set differently in production CoCalc.)
echo $USER
To use SSH key authentication with the Docker container, have your private key file in the usual place in the host computer, for example ~/.ssh/.id_cocalc, and copy the matching public key into your project's home directory. For example, you could do the following in a .term in your project:
cd
mkdir .ssh
chmod 700 .ssh
vi .ssh/authorized_keys
... paste in contents of ~/.ssh/id_cocalc.pub from host computer ...
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
Get a bash shell insider the container, then connect to the database and make a user (me!) an admin as follows:
$ docker exec -it cocalc bash
root@931045eda11f:/# make-user-admin wstein@gmail.com
Obviously, you should really make the user you created (with its email address) an admin, not me! Refresh your browser, and then you should see an extra admin panel in the lower right of accounts settings; you can also open any project by directly visiting its URL.
Sign in as a user that is an admin (see the previous section above). Click on the Admin tab at the top, search for the user, and then click the "Password" toggle, and click "Request Password Reset Link...".
This does NOT set the password. It just makes a password reset link, which you send your user via some communications channel that works. You may need this because:
- You do not have email setup. It is possible to setup Sendgrid so your cocalc-docker image sends out email, but we haven't documented that yet...
- You have email setup, but it sometimes fails for users with aggressive spam filtering.
After making your main account an admin as above, search for " Registration Tokens" in the Admin tab. Create one or more tokens and share them with people who you want to use your server. Nobody else will be able to make an account.
If docker exec -it cocalc bash doesn't seem to give you the right terminal height, e.g. content is only displayed in the uppper part of the terminal, this workaround may help when launching bash:
docker exec -e COLUMNS="`tput cols`" -e LINES="`tput lines`" -it cocalc bash
More information on this issue is in moby issue 33794.
In order to build and run CoCalc on an SELinux box, first set SELinux to permissive:
$ setenforce 0
Tell docker and SELinux to "play nicely":
$ chcon -Rt svirt_sandbox_file_t cocalc
return SELinux to enabled:
$ setenforce 1
-- via discussion
If you started the container as above, there will be a directory ~/cocalc on your host computer that contains all data and files related to your projects and users -- go ahead and verify that it is there before upgrading. It might look like this:
Williams-MacBook-Pro:~ wstein$ ls cocalc
be889c14-dc96-4538-989b-4117ffe84148 postgres conf
The directory postgres contains the database files, so all projects, users, file editing history, etc. The directory conf contains some secrets and log files. There will also be one directory (like be889c14-dc96-4538-989b-4117ffe84148) for each project that is created.
To get the newest image, do this (which will take some time):
docker pull sagemathinc/cocalc
Once done, you can delete and recreate your CoCalc container: (This will not delete any of your project or user data, which you confirmed above is in ~/cocalc.)
docker stop cocalc
docker rm cocalc
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalc
Now visit https://localhost to see your upgraded server.
The CoCalc Docker images at Docker Hub contain a subset of all the software in at cocalc.com. At present, the images are about 12 GB while the cloud service has hundreds of GB of packages and libraries.
Suppose you'd like to add software to your local CoCalc instance after installing and starting the Docker container. Here's an example of how to add an install of texlive-full, in case you need more than the minimal texlive installation in the published image:
The Docker image is Ubuntu 18.04. You can do
sudo docker exec -it [container name] bash
to become root in the container, then do
apt-get install texlive-full
to install the package.
Note that the texlive-full package is over 3 GB. So you will need the additional disk space to install it, and it could take several minutes to over an hour to install, depending on your connection to the internet and the speed of your computer.
Additional notes:
- Be sure to type
umask 022first before you install software if you are using a method other thanapt-get. This step is needed to ensure that permissions are set properly. The default umask is 007. If you usepip3orpip2without setting the umask to 022, the package gets installed, but it is not visible to normal users as a result. - Most instructions for adding packages to Ubuntu 18.04 should work for CoCalc-Docker, for example
pip installfor Python 2 packages, andpip3 installfor Python 3 packages. - Whenever you upgrade your CoCalc image from Docker Hub as described in Upgrade above, you will need to repeat the above steps.
This section is for CoCalc developers.
Build the image:
make build-full # or make build
Run the image (to test):
make run
How I pushed this:
docker tag smc:latest sagemathinc/cocalc
docker login --username=sagemathinc
docker push sagemathinc/cocalc
Also to build at a specific commit:
docker build --build-arg commit=121b564a6b08942849372b9ffdcdddd7194b3e89 -t smc .