README.md

# Flamenco 2.0

Development repo for Flamenco 2.0 (originally known as brender). Flamenco is a
Free and Open Source Job distribution system for render farms.

Warning: currently Flamenco is in beta stage, testing welcome!

## Developer installation

In order to install Flamenco, 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 Flamenco folder:

```
$ cd Flamenco
$ 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 developed for `python2.7`. We will move to `python3`
eventually.

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

On OSX, in order to prevent some warnings, you might need to 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 `MySQL` or `SQLite` (for testing only, don't use in production).


### Grunt file for the Dashboard
In order to streamline UI development of the Dashboard, we use Jade templating
and Sass for the CSS generation. In oder to generate the templates and CSS needed
by the dashboard, you need to install [NodeJS](https://nodejs.org/en/) and run
the following commands.

#### OSX
```
cd flamenco/dashboard
npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install
grunt
```

#### Debian Linux
On linux you can install NodeJS using the package manager.
```
cd flamenco/dashboard
echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian wheezy-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install nodejs nodejs-legacy curl
curl -L --insecure https://www.npmjs.org/install.sh | bash
npm install -g grunt-cli
apt-get install ruby
gem install sass
npm install
grunt
```

## Running Flamenco
It's pretty simple. Move into each folder (dashboard, server, manager or worker)
and run:

```
$ ./manage.py runserver # will start the different components
```

When running this command for the Manager for the first time, you will be
prompted for some configuration parameters.

If you now visit `http://localhost: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
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 Flamenco.
Each folder contains an individual Flask application (except for the worker).
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).


### About the web interface
Frameworks and tools used by the interface are:

* jQuery
* Bootstrap
* DataTables

### User and Developer documentation

The documentation is built 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.