README.md

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

Basic requirement at the moment are:

• Python 2.7
• Flask
• peewee (ORM library)
• virtualenv (optional)

Following the Flask idea, we install the server, workers and dashboard unsing virtualenv. Text copied from the Flask guide.

$ 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:

$ pip install Flask

At this point you should install peewee as well:

$ easy_install peewee

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 /ets/hosts file:

127.0.0.1	brender-server	
127.0.0.1	brender-flask	

Running brender

It's pretty simple. Move into each one of the three folders and run - in three different terminals:

$ python server.py  		# will start the server
$ python worker.py			# will start the worker
$ python dashboard.py		# will start the dashboard

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

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)
• 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 Falsk application. Server and Worker exchange JSON formatted message between each other via HTTP, using GET or POST methods. Dashboard connect to the Server only and accepts connection from clients (Browsers).

At the moment we have the following addresses:

• http://brender-server:9999
• http://localhost:5000
• http://brender-flask:8888

About the web interface

Frameworks and tools used by the interface are:

• jQuery
• Bootstrap
• DataTables