About

This repository is used to build standalone 'single-file' versions of the glue application. It uses the pyinstaller package running on GitHub Actions. You can find all available built versions at http://glueviz.s3.amazonaws.com/installers/download.html.

Versioning

Since these are bundles of packages rather than a single package, we use calendar versioning with the format YYYY.MM.MICRO for the main bundles.

For maintainers

Anytime a commit is made to this repository, the workflow in build_applications.yml is run on all three main operating systems. The general workflow is as follows:

• Set up Python
• Install PyInstaller
• Install glue as well as all desired optional dependencies/plugins
• Run PyInstaller
• Post-process the executables, e.g. renaming to include the version number or making a dmg file
• Uploading to S3 bucket (http://glueviz.s3.amazonaws.com/installers)

Executables are created with the branch or tag name in the filename, so there will always be installed with 'main' in the name which reflect the latest version of the main branch, and we can create tags for any 'frozen' version in time that we want. This allows us to also maintain different branches with different set of dependencies. At the end of the day, we just need to ensure that tag names are unique, so for instance v?.?.? will typically be used for the primary installers that we create, but one could also push tags along the lines of ``v?.?.?-project1` for a specific project which might include some additional dependencies.

While we avoid using conda in the main branch and for the primary releases, it may be possible to use it in branches to install more complex dependencies on all platforms.

To run this locally, follow the same steps as in build_applications.yml. You should always do this in a clean virtual environment or conda environment as otherwise PyInstaller might pull in unrelated dependencies. A simplified version of running this locally would be:

python3.9 -m venv test-app
source test-app/bin/activate
pip install git+https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller
pip install glue-core glue-vispy-viewers glue-wwt PyQt5==5.14.2 PyQtWebEngine==5.14.0
pyinstaller glue_app.spec

The resulting application will be in the dist/ folder.