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Developing the Anvil Runtime and App Server

Overview

The Runtime and App Server are split up into a few modules. Broadly, client code is in Javascript; server code is in Clojure; and downlink code is in Python.

  • The client/ directory contains client-side code, written in Javascript and HTML. We depend on a few libraries, with particular emphasis on the Skulpt Python-to-Javascript compiler.

  • The database/ directory contains schemas for the Postgres database, including a Clojure library for performing migrations and database setup.

  • The downlink/ directory contains the code that runs your apps' server-side Python code.

  • The packaging/ directory contains scripts for building the App Server as a standalone package.

  • The services/ directory contains Javascript and Python source code for Anvil's "Services", add-in components that provide

  • The server/ directory contains the server-side Clojure code. This is split into two projects:

    • server/core/ is the Anvil Runtime library, which is used both by the standalone App Server and by the (non-open-source) Anvil hosted platform which can be found at anvil.works

    • server/app-server/ is the Anvil App Server, a standalone server that uses the Runtime library to serve a single Anvil app from the local filesystem.

Build Instructions

Prerequisites

To build the standalone runtime, you will need Leiningen and NPM/Node.

You will also need to (locally) install the embedded-traefik library. Do this in a separate directory from the Anvil source code:

$ git clone [email protected]:anvil-works/embedded-traefik.git
$ cd embedded-traefik/
$ lein install

Building

First, build the client component:

$ cd client/
$ npm install
$ npm run build

Next, build the server components and produce a Python package ready for distribution:

$ cd ../packaging/app-server
$ ./build-all

And now you can install the app-server:

pip install /anvil/runtime/packaging/app-server/python-package-build

Building and Running for Development

If you are doing development, then building the entire system every time is not ideal. You'll want to set up each component so it is easy to rebuild and restart. First, perform all the build steps above. Then:

Start a live rebuilder for the client-side components:

$ cd client/
$ npm run watch

On the server side, you can set up a sample configuration file, and start the standalone App Server as a lein REPL:

$ cd server/app-server
$ mkdir test-files/
$ cp anvil.conf.yaml.SAMPLE test-files/anvil.conf.yaml
$ lein repl

Finally, you can run the Downlink (we recommend setting up a Python virtual environment rather than installing its dependencies globally):

$ . ~/some/virtualenv/bin/activate
$ cd downlink/python/
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ export DOWNLINK_SERVER=ws://localhost:3030/_/downlink
$ python -m anvil_downlink_host.run

Tooling

You don't have to do all your development from the command line, of course!

We personally use and recommend the IntelliJ suite of IDEs: we use the Cursive plugin for our Clojure code, PyCharm for Python dvelopment, and WebStorm for front-end development.

Contributing

We welcome community contributions to the Anvil Runtime and App Server! Please submit Pull Requests and file issues at github.com/anvil-works/anvil-runtime.

In order to contribute code to this repository, you will need to sign a Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA). You can view and sign it here:

https://anvil-runtime-cla.anvil.app

About our CLA: Our CLA is the standard "HA-CAA-[I/E]-ANY" agreement from the Harmony Project, a CLA standardisation effort started by Canonical, makers of Ubuntu. The CLA absolves you of liability for the contents of your contributions, and assigns us rights to distribute any contributions as part of our commercial offerings, including an assignment of copyright, accompanied by a wide grant-back of rights so that you can still use your contribution for anything else.