I am no longer doing anything with brat and am not maintaining this at all.

This is a docker container deploying an instance of brat.

You will need two volumes to pass annotation data and user configuration to the container. Start by creating a named volume for each of them like this:

$ docker volume create --name brat-data
$ docker volume create --name brat-cfg

The brat-data volume should be linked to your annotation data, and the brat-cfg volume should contain a file called users.json. To add multiple users to the server use users.json to list your users and their passwords like so:

{
    "user1": "password",
    "user2": "password",
    ...
}

The data in these directories will persist even after stopping or removing the container. You can then start another brat container as above and you should see the same data. Note that if you are using docker < 1.9.0 named volumes are not available and you'll have to use a data-only container and --volumes-from instead.

You can also add data and edit the users from within the container. To add some data directly inside the container do something like:

$ docker run --name=brat-tmp -it -v brat-data:/bratdata cassj/brat /bin/bash
$ cd /bratdata
$ wget http://my.url/some-dataset.tgz
$ tar -xvzf some-dataset.tgz
$ exit  
$ docker rm brat-tmp

Or, if you have data on the host machine, you can check where docker is keeping the named volume with:

$ docker volume inspect brat-data 

and you can just copy the data into there from your host.

To run the container you need to specify a username, password and email address for BRAT as environment variables when you start the container. This user will have editor permissions.

$ docker run --name=brat -d -p 80:80 -v brat-data:/bratdata -v brat-cfg:/bratcfg -e BRAT_USERNAME=brat -e BRAT_PASSWORD=brat -e [email protected] cassj/brat