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!

Quick install with Docker

You can test Flamenco in an easy and quick way using Docker images.

Directory and repository setup

Before we proceed with the configuration of our containers we have to set up a few directories. In this example, we will set up the directory in /media/data/, but any directory would work.

$ cd /media/data/

Let's clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/armadillica/flamenco.git

This means that our repository directory is /media/data/flamenco (we will need this path soon).

MySQL container

Now we start the container, from MySQL Docker image. Keep in mind that Flamenco also works with SQLite and Posgres.

$ docker run -ti -p 3306:3306 --name mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root mysql

This database will be used both by the server and the manager.

Server

The Flamenco server needs to be linked to the mysql container, and also needs to have a few volumes mounted. The following command takes care of everything.

$ docker run -ti -p 9999:9999 --name flamenco_server --link mysql:mysql \
-v /media/data/flamenco/flamenco/server:/data/git/server \
-v /media/data/flamenco_data/storage/shared:/data/storage/shared \
-v /media/data/flamenco_data/storage/server:/data/storage/server \
armadillica/flamenco_server_dev

Manager

Setting up the manager is a very similar process, but needs some more interaction. Before we start let's make sure we know the path of the shared Blender binary.

$ docker run -ti -p 7777:7777 --name flamenco_manager --link flamenco_server:flamenco_server --link mysql:mysql \
-v /media/data/flamenco/flamenco/manager:/data/git/manager \
-v /media/data/flamenco_data/storage/shared:/data/storage/shared \
-v /media/data/flamenco_data/storage/manager:/data/storage/manager \
armadillica/flamenco_manager_dev

As soon as the container is up and running we will be prompted to provide the Blender path for Linux, OSX and Windows. Currently the worker is implemented assuming that all workers connecting to it have access to a shared location where the binary for each OS is located.

Dashboard

The final component we will install is the dashboard, which allows us to track the progress and manage the various jobs.

$ docker run -ti -p 8888:8888 --name flamenco_dashboard --link flamenco_server:flamenco_server \
-v /media/data/flamenco/flamenco/dashboard:/data/git/dashboard \
-v /media/data/flamenco_data/storage/dashboard:/data/storage/dashboard \
armadillica/flamenco_dashboard_dev

Now you can access Dashboard using the URL: http://127.0.0.1:8888, in order to see the humbnails corectly you will need to add the following line to your /etc/hosts file:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx      flamenco_server

Replacing xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx by the flamenco_server docker IP, you can find it running:

$ sudo docker inspect flamenco_server

When running the dashboard for the first time, we build the html components using gulp. Future updates can only be done by hand on the host OS at the moment.

Using docker-compose

Once all the containers have been set up, they can be managed using the docker-compose tool. Check out the docker-compose-example.yml as a base.

Worker

The Flamenco worker is a very simple standalone component. The only requirements needed for it are:

• Python 2.7
• the requests library
• the Pillow library

Notice that Pillow requires the folowing packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev python-dev

Is recommended to create and activate a virtual environment:

$ cd /media/data
$ virtualenv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate

We can make sure that we have the requests library installed on the virtual environment with:

(venv)$ pip install requests Pillow

After that, we can run the worker with:

(venv)$ python /media/data/flamenco/flamenco/worker/run.py --manager 127.0.0.1:7777

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).

Gulp 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 and run the following commands.

OSX

cd flamenco/dashboard
npm install -g gulp
npm install
gulp

Debian Linux Wheezy and Ubuntu 14.04

sudo aptitude install python3-pip libmysqlclient-dev build-essential python-dev libjpeg8 libjpeg8-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev python-pip

sudo pip install virtualenv
# install blender BAM using pip3
sudo pip3 install blender-bam

# install python deps (remember to `source bin/activate` first!)
pip install -r $FLAMENCODIR/requirements.txt

# dashboard dependencies
cd flamenco/dashboard

# this is needed only on wheezy distribution
sudo echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian wheezy-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

# On linux you can install NodeJS using the package manager.
sudo apt-get install nodejs nodejs-legacy curl
sudo curl -L --insecure https://www.npmjs.org/install.sh | bash
sudo npm install -g gulp
npm install
gulp

Running Flamenco

It's pretty simple. Move into each folder ( server, manager, dashboard, 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.