Shared Designs on a Network

[foofoodog]

I can not get this to work as described here.
https://github.com/henmedia/layerling/blob/main/README.md#shared-designs-on-a-network
I am a little fuzzy on why one would "serve" this app with node, or in docker, except perhaps to enable the MCP stuff, and the server side storage. It seems the server side storage needs PHP which I am not sure how that gets into mix.
Please advise.

[henmedia]

@foofoodog good question, and the README is not clear on this. The short version:

layerling itself is just a web page, nothing has to run for it except something that hands out its files. Shared designs need one extra thing: a folder on a computer that everybody on the network can reach. There are two ways to get it, and you only need one:

• With Node or Docker: start layerling with npm run start (or the Docker image) and set LAYERLING_SHARED_PROJECTS_DIR to a folder it may write to. In Docker you mount a folder and set the variable in compose.yml to the path inside the container. No PHP.
• With a plain web server: you serve the exported files (npm run export) from any web server that has PHP. store.php is already part of the export. Make a folder named store next to index.html that the web server may write to. That is where PHP comes in: only for this way.

Either way the start page then shows a folder On the server.

Which way are you trying, and what do you see: does the start page show the On the server folder? If you tell me how you start layerling and what goes wrong (an error message, a missing folder), I can tell you what is missing.

If you find layerling useful, a small donation helps me keep improving it. Thank you! 🙂

[henmedia]

@foofoodog, thank you, and well done getting it to run. You found the catch: the container runs as the user with the number 999, so the folder you mount has to be writable by that user. sudo chown 999:999 ./shared-projects does that, and user: "1000:1000" in the compose file (your own numbers, id -u and id -g) runs the container as you instead. The README only said "writable"; it and the compose file will say this from the next release on.

For LAYERLING_SHARED_PROJECTS_DIR=/srv/layerling-projects npm run start two things are needed: npm run build once beforehand (start serves what the build made), and a folder the user who starts it may write to; a folder under /srv usually belongs to root. If it still does not work, tell me what the terminal says when you start it, and what the start page shows.

[foofoodog]

@henmedia The npm start form of it is working for me now. I think maybe I was confused since the release notes on the home page pushes the designs section down and I was baffled by not seeing any, I guess. Thank you.

[henmedia]

@foofoodog, good to hear it works, and thank you for saying what tripped you up: the release notes on the start page can push the designs down, so the On the server folder is easy to miss.

[foofoodog]

@henmedia I got it to work either using -v and -e options for docker run, or editing the compose.yml and uncommenting the environment and volumes items, and adding a user: item to the layering service for docker compose. This also required a sudo chown ####:#### ./shared-projects/ to set the folder permissions.
Still no success with the "LAYERLING_SHARED_PROJECTS_DIR=/srv/layerling-projects npm run start" form of it.