Kiosc: an integrated platform for managing bioinformatics data analysis containers

In many bioinformatic data analysis projects, it is convenient to visualize plots and results through an interactive web app or dashboard. These interactive reports can then be shared with customers, collaborators, or the general public. Publishing and sharing these apps is not straightforward, becoming especially cumbersome when the number of projects and customers start growing. Docker containers offer a convenient way to package, distribute, and run interactive web apps, and their use is already widespread in the bioinformatics community. We developed Kiosc to simplify the orchestration of containerized web apps, organize them into projects, and regulate access control. We implemented it as a web server based on the Django framework, with a user- and admin-friendly interface as well as a REST API for programmatic tasks. Users can select Docker containers packaging apps like Plotly Dash, Shiny, or Quarto, and configure them to display the results of their analysis. Kiosc runs the containers with the appropriate network configuration and acts as a proxy to the web services running inside the containers. We have been maintaining a Kiosc instance for more than 5 years, serving 321 containers in 150 projects across multiple institutions. In this article, we introduce the main functionality in Kiosc and describe four use-cases that show how Kiosc can prove helpful to the broader bioinformatics community, such as configuring and running web apps for the interactive visualization of workflow results, and publishing companion apps for scientific articles. Kiosc is a self-hosted platform for publishing web apps, which doesn't require significant expertise in either Docker or network administration to be deployed. It provides a similar service to Kubernetes, but with a convenient web interface and much lower administration overhead.