[Documentation] How to run as a web app

[jim-smith]

** What aspect of the project could be better explained**
We should document a better phrased version of this.

1 clone the code base
2. cd into the main folder - where you should see a file called 'Justfile'

then you have two options:

option A - if you have the just tool installed.
$ just run
and it will build (first time around) and then spin up the web-app on 127.0.0.1:8000

option b (if you don;t like the idea of installing just)

$ python -m pip install just.sh
(installs a tool named (badly IMHO) just.sh )

$ just.sh

(which compiles the justfile into a local shell script called just.sh in the same directory)

$mv just.sh runwebapp.sh
( rename the recently created shell script to what it does and avoid conflicts with the tools the same name you installed)

$ ./runwebapp.sh run

then open 127.0.0.1:8000 in a browser

[manics]

From a K8TRE point of view the easiest way is to provide a Docker image. I've had a go at quickly building a demo image:

Dockerfile

# "just run" assumes .git is present so need to
# rm .dockerignore
# before building this Dockerfile

FROM docker.io/library/python:3.10

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y -q --no-install-recommends \
        just \
        npm

COPY . /src

WORKDIR /src

RUN python3 -mvenv .venv && \
    just devenv collectstatic && \
    .venv/bin/python manage.py migrate && \
    sed -i 's/runserver/runserver 0.0.0.0:8000/' justfile

EXPOSE 8000
CMD ["just", "run"]

rm .dockerignore
docker build -t sacro-viewer .
docker run -it --rm -p8000:8000 sacro-viewer

Open http://localhost:8000

[jim-smith]

@manics did that work? Your docker script has (inadvertently) taught me a lot of new docker things (I'm assuming the EXPOSE make the port available.

How big is the resulting container? the one I built with sacro&sacroml in was >3 Gb

[manics]

2.47 GB, it seems to work (presumably the demo data is included?)

I wouldn't use this as a production container, there are ways to optimise the build and reduce the size, but it requires understanding exactly how the application is structured and built.

[jim-smith]

next task is to decouple it from automatically opening the test data

[manics]

@jim-smith I've built a minimal Docker image with only the SACRO-viewer, size is 203 MB. I had some assistance from Google Gemini but I reviewed everything and made some changes:
main...manics:sacro-viewer:antigravity

Main change to SACRO-viewer is to make it pip installable as a Python wheel, which saves a lot of space because you can discard most of the node modules since they're only required for building the web assets, not for running.