scilifelab-serve-app

Simple local development scaffold for apps that may be deployed on SciLifeLab Serve.

Purpose

This repository provides a basic Docker-based environment to run and test your app locally before deploying to SciLifeLab Serve. It mirrors the structure required by Serve to run a "custom app" using Docker.

Demo app

The existing demo app is a minimal web application that serves a static HTML page from the project's persistent storage volume using Caddy as a static file server.

This demo app is intended to illustrate the structure and setup required for deploying an app to SciLifeLab Serve. You can replace the demo app with your own application by modifying the Dockerfile (and the various other files) in the app directory and adjusting the scilifelab-app.env file as needed.

To run the demo app:

• Start the project using ./docker-compose.sh up. This should pull the required Docker image and start the container. Add -d or --detach to the end of the command to run in the background.

• Access the app at http://localhost:4157. This ought to give you a "404 Not Found" message, as the demo app does not have any content in its persistent storage volume.

• To add content, place an index.html file in the /home/service/vol/www/ directory (the $APP_VOLUME_PATH/www/ directory) in the container while the container is running. The demo project's start-script.sh ensures that this directory exists.

  ./docker-compose.sh cp app/index.html app:/home/service/vol/www/

• Refresh the page at http://localhost:4157 to see your content.

You should also be able to rebuild the app using ./docker-compose.sh build, in which case the image will be rebuilt from the Dockerfile in the app directory instead of being pulled from the registry.

Non-servicable parts

The following parts of the setup are not intended to be modified by the user of this repository:

• docker-compose.sh: A wrapper script for docker compose that sets up the environment and passes the correct arguments to the docker compose command. You would use this script instead of calling docker compose directly.

• scilifelab-compose.yml: The Docker Compose configuration file that defines the service, the volume, and sets up the necessary ports and environment variables. Note that the Compose file uses a static address and port number, 127.0.0.1:4157, and that it overrids any CMD or ENTRYPOINT defined in the app's Dockerfile (it always runs ./start-script.sh).

Customizable parts

The following parts of the setup are intended to be modified by the user of this repository to suit their specific app:

• scilifelab-app.env: The environment file where you can modify a limited set of environment variables to configure "SciLifeLab Serve"-specific settings for your app. This corresponds roughly to the settings you would configure in the Serve web interface when deploying a custom app. Adding more variables here will not have any effect.

• The app directory: This is where you would place your app's Dockerfile and any other files needed to build your app's Docker image. You can modify the Dockerfile to set up your app as required. As previously mentioned, the CMD and ENTRYPOINT instructions in the Dockerfile will be overridden by the Compose file to always run ./start-script.sh upon container start.