Warning
As of Aug 14, 2024, we have discontinued support for the Canvas App Explorer tool at University of Michigan. This GitHub repository is now archived.
Development mode for this application starts up 2 processes in the same container, one running on port 5000 (Python/Django backend) and one that writes to the disk and recompiles the frontend. This allows for changes to be picked up and re-built from the mounted local volumes.
With Docker installed run
docker-compose down; docker-compose build && docker-compose up
Then the app in development should be accessible on http://localhost:5000/
Now you can make changes to files in frontend and the changes should show up in the browser automagically.
This app can currently only be launched via LTI. Please see the Wiki for instructions on configuring with LTI.
The backend uses the Django Rest Framework to build out a REST API. When DEBUG is equal to True in Django settings, the application leverages the drf-spectacular library to document existing endpoints and provide for API testing using Swagger.
The OpenAPI schema can be downloaded as a YAML file from http://localhost:5000/api/schema. To use the Swagger UI, do the following:
- Launch the tool from a course in Canvas.
- Right-click in the iframe and select "View Frame Source" in Chrome (or your browser's equivalent).
- Change the URL to navigate to
/api/schema/swagger-ui.
Once on the page, requests can be made against the API using the "Try it out" functionality.
The openshift build compiles all of the frontend assets into the container during the build. It uses whitenoise currently to serve up the content.
To build, use the separate docker-compose-openshift-test.yml file. This uses a slightly different dockerfiles/Dockerfile.openshift that uses a static path and disables DEBUG.
docker compose -f docker-compose-openshift-test.yml build
Then to start it you can run
docker compose -f docker-compose-openshift-test.yml up
This should start up as expected on http://localhost:5000