The SlideWiki Platform will be delivered as a ready-to-run Docker container.
But Docker can also help in simplifying development. Based on the runtime
image for the platform we have developed a dynamic version that makes it
possible to edit the source code and hot-deploy your changes each time you
save it.
The image that is available from Docker Hub as slidewiki/devserver mounts
the source code of the platform from your host filesystem and monitors changes,
restarting the server each time a file is updated. This gives you the ability
to use your development environment to develop in SlideWiki without the need
to install the NodeJS ecosystem. You only need the source code and the devserver
image in order to run the platform.
When starting the devserver image you need to provide the absolute path to the slidewiki-platform project directory (pointing to volume locations in Docker always needs absolute paths). Also you need to provide a port on your host to bin the container’s nodeJS application port to. A typpical invocation looks like this:
docker run -it --rm --name swdev -p 3000:3000 -v /absolute/path/to/project:/nodeApp slidewiki/devserver
by default*, you should be able to see the running platform at http://localhost:3000
DOCKER_HOST and use the correct host like e.g. http://192.168.99.101:3000In the /configs directory in the project there needs to be a file that
configures the location of the microservices (microservices.js). We provide a
file called microservices.sample.js that lets the platform use the microservice
instances at our testing servers. The container startup script will copy the sample
file to the configuration file in case that microservices.js is not exsting. So
unless you want to use your own microservice instances you just don’t need to care about :)
Most displeasingly the devserver image does not work on Windows hosts as of now. The
reason is that the container runs npm install on startup in the project directory.
Since the project directory resides in the Windows host filesystem it fails to create
symlinks when installing the dependencies. The bug is known and filed as SWIK-286