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ONSIDES website

This website was originally created by dhvanim in 2022.

In 2024, it was brought back online by zietzm.

For questions about architecture and deployment, please contact zietzm.

Overview

This is a Flask app (backend/) with a React frontend (frontend/). It is deployed on Hetzner, using an nginx reverse proxy and a gunicorn HTTP server. We programmatically deploy using ansible.

For backend development, we use uv. To get started, install uv and run uv sync --locked to create a virtual environment containing all the requirements in pyproject.toml.

The database backend for this is a single SQLite database file. First, download and unpack a release of ONSIDES. For example:

mkdir data
cd data
wget https://github.com/tatonetti-lab/onsides/releases/download/v2.1.0-20240925/onsides_v2.1.0_20240925.tar.gz
tar -xzvf onsides_v2.1.0_20240925.tar.gz

To create the database, use the etl/build-database.sh file. You'll need to modify the first line to reference the path to the unpacked data directory. This will take a few minutes to run. Once complete, the database.db file should be ~300 MB.

This server depends on a single environmental variable (ONSIDESDB), which points to the database file. This must be set for the server to function properly.

To start a development server, run ONSIDESDB=database.db uv run flask run. Optionally, you can put the server into explicit development mode (enables hot reloading files as changed) via the environmental variable FLASK_DEBUG (i.e. FLASK_DEBUG=1 ONSIDESDB=database.db uv run flask run).

In production, the backend runs using a gunicorn server through a systemd process. The file flask-app.service.j2 is a templated systemd service file for this.

During development, you may want to change the API URL at frontend/src/api/onsides.js:

// Possibly change this line
axios.defaults.baseURL = "https://onsidesdb.org/api";
// To the following
axios.defaults.baseURL = "http://localhost:5000/api";

There are many tools you can use for frontend development here. Personally, I use bun. To get started, I run bun install --frozen-lockfile.

To build the frontend to static files, I run bun run build. For a frontend-specific development server, I run bun run start. Note that this will need a backend API available, either through the website at https://onsidesdb.org/api or on localhost via a Flask development server.

To see exactly what happens during deployment, consult the ansible playbook deploy.yml, which provides step-by-step instructions for deployment.

Additionally, this requires an ansible inventory file specifying the login information for the server. This could basically look like this (in the file /etc/ansible/hosts).

all:
  hosts:
    hetzner:
      ansible_host: 5.78.130.180
      ansible_user: root
      ansible_ssh_private_key_file: /Users/yourname/.ssh/id_ed25519

Change the last line to the path to your ssh private key.

If you are not me, you'll probably need to log in to Hetzner and set up a new SSH key.

TL;DR

  • Make some changes to the repository and want to deploy?
uvx --from ansible-core ansible-playbook deploy.yml
  • Want to update the data?

Get the latest release online.

# Change this to the latest release
wget https://github.com/tatonetti-lab/onsides/releases/download/v2.1.0-20240925/onsides_v2.1.0_20240925.tar.gz
tar -xzvf onsides_v2.1.0_20240925.tar.gz
./etl/build-database.sh
# This produces database.db

Random other facts

  • This machine also hosts WebGWAS.
  • onsidesdb.org was acquired through AWS, so any DNS changes will need to be made there.
  • We use Cloudflare nameservers (through zietzm's account; contact me if this needs to be changed).
  • *.j2 files are Jinja2 templates that ansible fills in for us during deployment. On the server, they will be just plain files (e.g. flask-app.service, nginx.conf).
  • SSL certificates are through Let's Encrypt. These should be updated automatically by certbot, but, if not, just run through the ansible playbook or SSH in and run certbot manually.