appyter-catalog: A catalog of appyters

Pull requests encouraged, please refer to the example for registering your own appyter.

Deployment

Currently, because this application deals with several independent appyters, we construct Dockerfiles independently for each and facilitate deployment with docker-compose.yml. In the future this can be extended to automatically generating a kubernetes deployment or simply using docker-in-docker, but for now a simple Makefile will do the trick of hosting the docker-compose on a single system.

# Download the catalog locally
git clone git@github.com:MaayanLab/appyter-catalog.git

# Build+run everything
make deploy

# Build+run specific components
make appyters/example/.deploy app/.deploy

# Publish specific component
make appyters/example/.publish

Details

The appter-catalog does several things to permit integration of several independent appyters with their own dependencies while permitting various modifications performed at the entire application level.

1. Submit pull request with new appyter added to appyters directory.
2. .github/workflows/validate_merge.yml instructs github to execute validate/validate_merge.py
3. validate/validate_merge.py executes, validating the structure of the directory including
   1. Asserting that appyter.json is formatted according to the schema/appyter-validator.json json-schema validator
   2. Asserting that other relevant files are present
   3. Uses compose/build_dockerfile.py to construct and build a Dockerfile the same way it would be done in production
4. PR is accepted if and only if the validation and manual review is passed
5. Makefile can be used to facilitate the remaining steps
6. Run compose/build_dockerfile.py for each appyter to inject overrides, catalog_helper, and construct a Dockerfile for the appyter
   1. When built, the files in override will be merged (using compose/catalog_helper.py) with the appyter's own appyter overrides
7. Run compose/build_appyters.py to build a unified appyters.json file, containing information about each appyter for the app
8. Run cd app && npm i && npm run build to build the app (written in nodejs) with the most recently rendered appyters.json
9. Run compose/build_compose.py to build a application wide docker-compose.yml which includes a unified proxy for serving all apps on one endpoint
10. Run docker-compose build to build all Dockerfiles for the appyters and the app
    1. Variables in .env are automatically loaded by docker-compose
    2. appyter_version in .env is used as a Dockerfile arg permitting easy updates to the version used by all appyters
    3. A postgres database is used through postgrest for app state.
       1. postgres/migrations contains the postgres schema of that database, which are applied at database initialization in postgres/Dockerfile
11. Run docker-compose up -d to start all docker containers in the application.
    1. Variables in .env are automatically loaded by docker-compose
    2. maayanlab/proxy is used to proxy different paths to the respective containers and set up https with letsencrypt
    3. postgrest exposes postgres tables, views, and functions on the api schema with the guest role over HTTP at /postgrest
    4. app facilitates showing all appyters and navigating users to the mount location of the actual appyter container.
    5. data/<container_name> contains all application data split up by container mounted from the host.