GeniusWebPython Parties Server

This is the homepage of the GeniusWeb parties server. This server can provide a list of runnable parties, and create running instances of specified parties on a HTPT GET request. When an instance is made, a websocket link to the running party is provided to the caller.

The GeniusWeb main page is ​here.

The Parties server runs on Tomcat 8.

This server behaves almost identical to the java-oriented ​partiesserver and in fact is mostly a copy of it. The main difference is that this server can run python parties instead of java-based parties.

The only difference is that in this server, instead of java-based parties inside a jar file, you plug in python-based parties inside a tar.gz file.

Installation

• Have a FRESH python 3.8 or 3.9 installed on your machine, for use with the pythonpartiesserver. This must be a full python installation. We recommend downloading python from ​python.org, either run an installer or to build the sources. Especially if you build from sources, you can place the python executable anywhere you like, so you can place it where it does not interfere with your standard installation. Some package installers appear to not support pip, venv etc out of the box. GeniusWebPythonPartiesServer does not work with such partial installations.
• The python installation must be fresh, meaning it should not have pip-installed modules and pip list should only return pip and setuptools. This is important because pre-installed modules might make your party work on *your machine only* despite missing dependency information in the setup.py file. That would lead to failure when your party would be deployed somewhere else, eg for a competition.
• Install your apache-tomcat 8 installation ​​https://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi. You can re-use an existing installation.
• Download the parties server war file from ​the artifactory. Go into the latest version of the pypartiesserver and download (right click) the war file. NOTICE: your browser must have cookies enabled to access the artifactory.
• Copy the downloaded war file into the tomcat webapps directory
• Set the environment variable PYTHON3EXE to point to python 3.8 or 3.9 (the python application you installed).
• (Re)start tomcat

Now your local pypartiesserver should be up and running.

Note: the pythonpartiesserver installed and runs all parties in a virtualenv. So your installation will stay clean.

Tomcat from apt-get install

If you install tomcat with apt-get install instead, then you may have to take additional steps to make this work with the python parties server. Otherwise the server will be unable to use the python system properly. The following steps are needed

• sudo su -
• vi /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/tomcat9.service
• Under "Security" Change:
  • PrivateTmp=yes to PrivateTmp=no
  • ProtectSystem=strict to ProtectSystem=no
• Restart tomcat

Upgrade

To upgrade,

• Stop tomcat
• remove the old war file plus the unzipped version (if exists) from the tomcat webapps directory
• repeat the installation as above

GUI

After installing and starting, go to ​http://localhost:8080/pypartiesserver-2.0.0 (replace 2.0.0 with the version you installed). You should get this webpage

You can click on "The parties list with currently runnable parties" to get

To create your own parties, refer to ​Writing a party.

Adding or changing a Party

To change a profile or add a new party,

• Make sure the profiles server has been run (romcat will unzip the war file)
• Locate the unzipped pypartiesserver folder inside your tomcat webapps directory
• locate the partiesrepo directory inside that folder. This folder contains all current parties
• Copy your new version of a party.tar.gz over an existing one. Or copy a new party.tar.gz into this folder.
• The parties should now show up in the "list of party files" on the server webpage. Make sure you force refresh the page as some browsers show only old cached data.
• If the file is visible in that list, but does not show up in list of "currently runnable parties" then the tar.gz does not contain a valid party. Check the apache tomcat logs to see why the tar.gz has been rejected.

Log file

The log file name can be set by the party in its constructor. If it uses the default (None), then the party class name is used as log filename, and .log as extension.

The .log file is in the directory where you start the server If you run from tomcat, it often is in the Eclipse application directory, eg in Eclipse2020EE.app/Contents/MacOS; if you manually start it, in the directory where you executed the startup.sh command; etc.

Debugging

Debugging on the server is complicated because python programs are run as native processes, and thus are not directly controlled by your IDE. We recommend debugging directly in ​GeniusWebPython. If you really need to debug on the server, you may try ​remote debugging with pdb, ​remote debugging eclipse or ​remote debug visual studio.

Communication protocol

For the communication protocol of partiesservers, please refer to ​GeniusWebPartiesServer documentation

Source code

You can download the source repository of the implementation. Note that you don't need this if you just want to use the parties server to host your parties or to compile parties.

svn co https://tracinsy.ewi.tudelft.nl/pub/svn/GeniusWebPythonPartiesServer

Since this is a tomcat web application, you need Eclipse Enterprise edition if you want to run this from Eclipse. Also, to checkout from Eclipse, you need to prepare Eclipse for this. Check ​​https://tracinsy.ewi.tudelft.nl/pubtrac/GeniusWeb/wiki/WikiStart

It is maven based so you only need maven to compile the code.