Source Code Setup

The following instructions have been tested on Fedora 28 with Python 3.6. Instructions for other Linux distributions should be similar.

All software components have dependencies defined in pyproject.toml and pyproject.lock files (see PEP 518). Poetry is used to work with these files, to automatically create virtual environments and to build and deploy the resulting Python packages.

Development Setup

System Packages

Curious Containers requires a Linux distribution of your choice and the latest stable version of Docker to be installed. It is recommended to install Docker-CE from the official external Docker repository (see instructions), because Docker packages shipped by Linux distributions are often outdated.

In addition to Docker-CE, install the following system packages.

sudo dnf install git python3-pip python3-venv               # general dev dependencies
sudo dnf install uwsgi uwsgi-plugin-python3 docker-compose  # ccagency dev dependencies

Python Virtual Environments

mkdir -p ~/.cache/cc/
python3 -m venv ~/.cache/cc/poetry
python3 -m venv ~/.cache/cc/dev

Poetry

Install Poetry, which will handle all the Python dependencies of each package.

source ~/.cache/cc/poetry/bin/activate
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdispater/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python
deactivate
source ~/.poetry/env

Python Packages

The Python packages of Curious Containers have complementary dependencies, that can be installed into a single venv.

git clone https://github.com/curious-containers/curious-containers.git
cd curious-containers

# activate venv
source ~/.cache/cc/dev/bin/activate

# install packages via poetry
# the order of installation matters, because otherwise poetry replaces the source code installation of a package (egg)
# with the PyPI version of a package
cd cc-faice
poetry install
cd ..

cd cc-agency
poetry install
cd ..

cd cc-core
poetry install
cd ..

cd red-val
poetry install
cd ..

cd red-fill
poetry install
cd ..

Check if commandline tools work as expected.

faice --help
ccagency --help

Running CC-Agency

Run the following components in separate terminals.

Terminal 1 - MongoDB

Run MongoDB in a Docker container. Make sure that

cd cc-agency
docker-compose -f dev/docker-compose.yml up

The created database is stored in the local filesystem (see dev/docker-compose.yml for details) and will persist if the container is deleted.

A MongoDB admin user account is created automatically by a mongo-seed container defined in dev/docker-compose.yml. The credentials are read from dev/cc-agency.yml.

Terminal 2 - CC-Agency Trustee

You can only run one process/thread of CC-Agency Trustee at a time. It provides a central in-memory secrets storage for experiments. If you restart this service all secrets will be lost and unfinished experiments will fail.

source ~/.cache/cc/dev/bin/activate

cd cc-agency
uwsgi --ini dev/uwsgi-trustee.ini

Terminal 3 - CC-Agency Controller

You can only run one process/thread of CC-Agency Controller at a time. It provides the central scheduling component, which connectes to a cluster of docker-engines.

source ~/.cache/cc/dev/bin/activate

cd cc-agency
ccagency-controller -c dev/cc-agency.yml

Terminal 4 - CC-Agency Broker

CC-Agency Broker provides a REST API, to schedule RED experiments, receive agent callbacks and to query information. It informs the Controller about changes via a ZMQ socket. Edit dev/uwsgi.ini to increase the number of Broker processes or threads.

source ~/.cache/cc/dev/bin/activate

cd cc-agency
uwsgi --ini dev/uwsgi-broker.ini

Create Users

Create users to authenticate with the CC-Agency Broker REST API, with or without admin privileges. Admin privileges can change the behaviour of certain API endpoints.

source ~/.cache/cc/dev/bin/activate

cd cc-agency
ccagency create-broker-user -c dev/cc-agency.yml

Reset Database

If you need to reset the database during development, run the following command and specify the collections to be dropped.

source ~/.cache/cc/dev/bin/activate

cd cc-agency
COLLECTIONS="experiments batches users tokens block_entries callback_tokens"
ccagency drop-db-collections -c dev/cc-agency.yml ${COLLECTIONS}

Updated: