Toolhub/Progress reports/2020-12-11

Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2020-12-11.

Display of Crawler history

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T264969

Srishti has started work on displaying information about past crawler runs. Like most of our backend/frontend collaborations the work on the frontend is helping identify improvements that we can make on the API side of things. Bryan has a few todos that should make it easier to setup a nice frontend.

New feature for Blubber

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T263597 resolved

While working on setting up a demo server, Bryan ran into a missing feature in Blubber had been noticed previously. Blubber lacked the ability to copy files from one variant to another while also making the copied files available in time to use them with a builder instruction. Toolhub needs this support so that it can compile its Vue frontend code in a container with a nodejs runtime and then use those compiled files in a container with a python3 runtime. Bryan worked with DDuvall (WMF) to design and implement support in Blubber for this workflow.

Demo server

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T269018

Bryan has been working towards a demonstration server and user acceptance testing setup for Toolhub in Cloud VPS. There is not a lot of visible work to show for this effort yet, but Bryan has produced a single Docker container running the entire application that works on his laptop. Much of the work in this past week was spent on enhancing Blubber. That investment will benefit not only the demo server but also the eventual production deployment. It seems likely that a full demo environment will be available sometime in the coming week.

UI fixups in progress

Srishti has been making a list of small things that she would like to see improved in the UI. She has a few patches up for review in Gerrit that start fixing these annoyances. We also expect to get more things to add to the list as soon as we have a working demo server and can solicit feedback from the advisory council.

Wrap up

With only 2 work weeks left in the current quarter, Bryan and Srishti are both busy trying to close out work in progress tasks and start the remaining planned work for this planning period. Some things are taking a bit longer than estimated, but we are cautiously optimistic that we will be able to wrap up most things before starting our end of year holiday break. We are also very excited to be so close to a working demo environment that is expected to help refine the product in our next quarter of work (January-March).