Web Dashboard

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Allows monitoring of instrument PVs via a web page.

Tech Stack

Frontend: NextJS using React, Tailwind CSS

Backend: pvws

Development

Install NodeJS - we are using nvm-windows for installing on windows, and the lts version of node.

To install all dependencies, use:

  npm install

Running

This web dashboard relies on a PVWS instance to forward EPICS data via a websocket. #30 should mean that there is a central instance running which will be used for production, but you may point your web dashboard at a local instance for dev work.

Running PVWS locally for development

To run a PVWS instance locally, the Tomcat 9 binaries need to be downloaded. After this:

1. Download the nightly webapp pvws.war from the PVWS homepage and place it in webapps\ of your tomcat download
2. Create a file called setenv.bat in the bin\ folder of tomcat with your EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST and EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST (you can get these by doing set EPICS_CA in an epicsterm.bat) ie this, where 1.2.3.4 is your CA gateway address:

set EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST=127.255.255.255 1.2.3.4
set EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=NO

3. cd to bin\ and run catalina.bat start to start the tomcat server. you can verify this is working by going to http://localhost:8080/pvws/ - you should see a summary webpage.
4. Create an .env.local file with NEXT_PUBLIC_WS_URL set to the pvws URL you are using. For example:

NEXT_PUBLIC_WS_URL=ws://<hostname>:<port>/pvws/pv

To start in dev mode, use:

  npm run dev

To build and start in prod mode, use:

  npm run build && npx serve@latest out

Note

Images will not work properly here as a basePath has not been injected (as per the CI actions)

Container approach

To run dev mode in containerd instead, run nerdctl compose -f compose.yaml up. This will mount your current directory as a volume in the container which means any changes will make nextjs re-compile pages. This also means that anything in the dotenv files are picked up, including the PVWS URL.

Building

For a production build, run npm run build. To start this build natively, use npm run start.