Allow custom volume mounts to aiidalab container

[danielhollas]

I've just started playing with aiidalab-launch and it works great! Much better experience than before.

However, it seems that I cannot currently utilize it since I need to have a custom volume mounted for my aiidalab application.* Would it be possible to add a profile setting to have custom volumes?

• my package depends on a quantum chemistry package ORCA, which is not open source and cannot be automatically installed. My current solution to this problem is to mount a directory with the ORCA binaries as a volume to the aiidalab container. I am all ears if there is a better approach. :-)

[csadorf]

@danielhollas Thanks for the feedback and for reporting the issue! I think adding a feature for mounting additional volumes would be in scope.

For this, I would suggest to add a a volumes key to the profile configuration that uses a syntax similar or equal to those of the docker-compose file: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#volumes

I don't have the bandwidth to work on this at the moment, but I can propose this to the team at the next meeting. In any case, would you potentially be open/interested in giving this a shot yourself?

Please note that aiidalab-launch has some function overlap with docker-compose and there is an ongoing effort (#127) that would potentially refactor aiidalab-launch to use docker-compose instead of docker, but I don't expect that to come to pass for at least another month or so.

[danielhollas]

@csadorf Thank for the info! I will give it a shot, feel free to assign this issue to me.