brender 2.0

Development repo for brender 2.0 (the original version 1.0 is here https://github.com/oenvoyage/brender). This is the Flask-based version, a new direction taken after getting some feedback from Sergey and Keir.

Developer installation

In order to install brender, we recommend to set up a Python virtual environment.

$ sudo easy_install virtualenv

On Linux this might work better:

$ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

Once you have virtualenv installed, just fire up a shell and create your own environment. You may want to create this folder inside of the brender folder:

$ cd brender
$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing distribute............done.

Now, whenever you want to work on a project, you only have to activate the corresponding environment. On OS X and Linux, do the following:

$ . venv/bin/activate

Now you can just enter the following command to get Flask activated in your virtualenv:

Core dependencies

The project has been developped for python2.7.

On Unix systems, to install python dependencies, you may need to install python-dev package.

On OSX, in order to prevent some warnings, you should first run:

$ ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future

Then we just install all the packages required (run this on all systems)

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Databases are managed by SQLite3.

Psutil is needed for gathering system usage/performance stats on the worker. Ideally psutil is needed only on the workers.

Congratulations, brender and its dependencies should be correctly installed and ready to run. As a final step we should add a couple of hostnames into the /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1	brender-server
127.0.0.1	brender-dashboard
127.0.0.1   brender-manager

Initialize brender

First you need to initialize the server and manager's databases:

$ cd server; ./manage.py db upgrade
$ cd manager; ./manage.py db upgrade

Running brender

It's pretty simple. Move into each node folder and run - in four different terminals:

$ ./manage.py runserver  		# will start the node (dashoard, server, manager or worker according to the current folder)

If you now visit http://brender-dashboard:8888 with your web browser you should see the dashboard!

It is also possible to configure the different applications. You may find a config.py.example, so you can rename it to config.py and edit it before run the application.

Architecture

At the moment the content of the brender folder is quite messy due to refactoring. The important subfolders are:

• server containing the server files
• worker containing the worker files (render nodes)
• manager containing the manager files (manage clusters)
• dashboard containing the dashboard (web interface to talk to the server)

This structure explains also the naming conventions adopted to distinguish the different parts of brender. Each folder contains an individual Flask application. Server, Manager and Worker exchange JSON formatted messages between each other via a Rest API. Dashboard connects to the Server only and accepts connections from clients (Browsers).

At the moment we have the following addresses:

• http://brender-server:9999
• http://localhost:5000
• http://brender-dashboard:8888
• http://brender-manager:7777

About the web interface

Frameworks and tools used by the interface are:

• jQuery
• Bootstrap
• DataTables

User and Developer documentation

Most of this document will be migrated into the docs folder, alongside with the user documentation.

The documentation is made with Sphinx and uses the readthedocs.org theme, so make sure you have it installed. Instructions are available here:

https://github.com/snide/sphinx_rtd_theme

The _build contains the locally compiled documentation, which does not need to be committed to the branch.

We are using sphinxcontrib-httpdomain for the API docs, so make sure you do:

pip install sphinxcontrib-httpdomain