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

In order to install brender, 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 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:

Core dependencies

On OSX, in order to prevent some warnings, you should first 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

Psutil is needed for gathering system usage/performance stats on the worker. Ideally psutil is needed only on the workers.

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 /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1	brender-server
127.0.0.1	brender-dashboard

Running brender

It's pretty simple. Move into the brender folder and run - in three different terminals:

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

If you now visit http://brender-dashboard: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 Flask application. Server and Worker exchange JSON formatted messages between each other via HTTP, using GET or POST methods. Dashboard connects to the Server only and accepts connections from clients (Browsers).

At the moment we have the following addresses:

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

About the web interface

Frameworks and tools used by the interface are:

• jQuery
• Bootstrap
• DataTables

User and Developer documentation

Most of this document will be migrated into the docs folder, alongside with the user documentation.

The documentation is made 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.