How to deploy the Redash data visualization dashboard with the help of Docker

Jack Wallen shows you how easily you can deploy the powerful data visualization tool Redash as a Docker container.

Redash is a powerful data visualization tool that is built for fast access to data collected from various sources. You can connect Redash to Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Graphite, Presto, Google Sheets, Cloudera Impala, Hive and even your own custom scripts. The visualizations included are charts, pivot tables, cohorts, boxplots, counters, funnels, maps, sankeys, sunbursts and word clouds.

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Redash includes a powerful query editor and even allows for easy collaboration as well as the ability to create numerous, customized dashboards.

I’m going to show you how to deploy this data visualization tool as a Docker container.

What you’ll need

The only things you’ll need to make this work are a running instance of Ubuntu Server (or another distribution that supports Docker) and a user with sudo privileges. With those at the ready, let’s make some container magic.

How to deploy Redash

Normally, I’d first walk you through the process of installing Docker, but the developers behind Redash have created a very easy-to-use setup script that installs everything you need (docker-ce and docker-compose) and then deploys everything necessary for Redash to function.

The first thing you should do is make certain your system is up-to-date. Log into Ubuntu Server and issue the following two commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Remember, if the kernel gets upgraded, you'll need to reboot the machine for the changes to take effect.

Once the upgrade is complete, download the installer script with the command:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/setup/master/setup.sh

Give the installer executable permissions with:

chmod u+x setup.sh

Finally, run the installer with:

sudo ./setup.sh

The deployment will take anywhere from 2-10 minutes (depending on your network speed and hardware). Once it completes, the containers are deployed and ready to use.

How to access Redash

Open a web browser and point it to http://SERVER (where SERVER is the IP address or domain of the hosting server). It might take a moment to connect (as the containers complete their deployment), but you will eventually find yourself on the Redash admin user setup page (Figure A).

Figure A

Click Setup and the deployment will complete, landing you on the main Redash page (Figure B), where you can connect to your first data source and build dashboards to serve all your data visualization needs.

Figure B

Congratulations, you now have a very powerful data visualization tool at the ready. Next time around, we’ll take a look at how to connect a data source to Redash. Until then, you should gather your data source information and get ready to visualize some data.

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