Home App design

[yakutovicha]

The aim of the issue is to bring together the design decisions and open questions related to the aiidalab-home app. Once they are discussed and agreed - they will go into the this wiki page to be the main reference point.

Key components of the home app

• Home page
• App Store
• Linux terminal
• File manager
• Task manager
• App home page (better name for this?)
• AppBase class

Tight binding with Git

• Any app is a Git repository
• App versions are Git tags (lightweight or annotated)
• Check for updates by comparing remote and local git branches
• Uses dulwich package to get the Git functionality (motivation is provided in Choose an appropriate python library to work with Git aiidalab-home#11)

AppBase class

• Install/uninstall/update apps
• Looks for the available app updates
• Gets app-related meta information.
• Does not allow to delete an app if Git has detected modifications.
• Future plans:
  • Install app dependencies (Fix travis #12)
  • Check for newer tagged versions (Bump django from 1.11.20 to 1.11.23 #21)
  • Allow to "force delete" the apps (Bump pillow from 6.1.0 to 6.2.0 #22)

App home page

• Contains basic information about an app: authors, description, logo, external URL, repository/Git URL, and Git information.
• Allows to select a particular version of an app (selection among Git tags and Git branches)
• Allows to install/uninstall/update app
• Future plans:
  • Redirect to this page if the link references an app that is not installed (Remove python2 dependencies #17)

App Store

• Install/uninstall/update apps
• Show minimal info about an App (logo, authors, short description)
• Allows to show filter only installed apps
• Allows to filter apps by categories
• Allows to show a given number apps per page
• Future plans:
  • Consider to replace install/uninstall/update buttons with "Manage" button that lead to the App home page. This will make the App Store more lightweight. (Develop #20)
  • Select app by typing its name (Prepare release 19.09.0a1 #19)
  • Show the latest app version

Home page

• Shows installed apps
• Allows to modify the apps order
• Future plans:
  • Allow to change the current AiiDA profile (Bump aiida and other dependencies #23)

Dependencies

• apps_meta.json that is generated on the AiiDA lab server. It contains basic information about an app, app-related metadata, Git information.
• aiidalab-registry is used for the generation of apps_meta.json. It contains two main files:
  • apps.json that has all the available apps and basic info:
    • git_url [mandatory]- link to the git repository
    • meta_url [mandatory] - link to the metadata.json file inside each repository
    • categories [optional] - list of categories this app belongs to.
  • categories.json file that lists all the possible app categories (with title and description)
• App-specific metadata.json file, that has can contain the following fields:
  • title
  • description
  • version - I think this one should be removed. The version is already provided as a Git tag
  • authors
  • logo
  • state - can be registered, development, stable
  • documentation_url
  • external_url

[yakutovicha]

In order to avoid work duplication, let's agree on the general concepts. I just collected all I had in mind (+ some suggestions from @CasperWA ). Let me know if you have other ideas

[yakutovicha]

I think we can close this. The things have changed quite a bit and this issue appears to be outdated.