This is the web UI for the Flyte platform.

Running flyteconsole locally requires NodeJS and yarn. Once these are installed, all of the dependencies can be installed by running yarn in the project directory.

Before we can run the server, we need to set up an environment variable or two. Environment variables can be set either in the current shell or persisted in .env file stored under the root of the repository.

ADMIN_API_URL (default: window.location.origin)

The Flyte console displays information fetched from the Flyte Admin API. This environment variable specifies the host prefix used in constructing API requests.

Note: this is only the host portion of the API endpoint, consisting of the protocol, domain, and port (if not using the standard 80/443).

This value will be combined with a suffix (such as /api/v1) to construct the final URL used in an API request.

Default Behavior

In most cases, flyteconsole will be hosted in the same cluster as the Admin API, meaning that the domain used to access the console is the same value used to access the API. For this reason, if no value is set for ADMIN_API_URL, the default behavior is to use the value of window.location.origin.

BASE_URL (default: undefined)

This allows running the console at a prefix on the target host. This is necessary when hosting the API and console on the same domain (with prefixes of /api/v1 and /console for example). For local development, this is usually not needed, so the default behavior is to run without a prefix.

CORS_PROXY_PREFIX (default: /cors_proxy)

Sets the local endpoint for CORS request proxying.

To start the local development server, run yarn start. This will spin up a Webpack development server, compile all of the code into bundles, and start the NodeJS server on the default port (3000). All requests to the NodeJS server will be stalled until the bundles have finished. The application will be accessible at http://localhost:3000 (if using the default port).

This project has support for Storybook. Component stories live next to the components they test, in a __stories__ directory, with the filename pattern {Component}.stories.tsx.

You can run storybook with yarn run storybook, and view the stories at http://localhost:9001.

Communication with the Flyte Admin API is done using Protobuf as the request/response format. Protobuf is a binary format, which means looking at responses in the Network tab won't be very helpful. To make debugging easier, each network request is logged to the console with it's URL followed by the decoded Protobuf payload. You must have debug output enabled (on by default in development) to see these messages.

This application makes use of the debug libary to provide namespaced debug output in the browser console. In development, all debug output is enabled. For other environments, the debug output must be enabled manually. You can do this by setting a flag in localStorage using the console: localStorage.debug = 'flyte:*'. Each module in the application sets its own namespace. So if you'd like to only view output for a single module, you can specify that one specifically (ex. localStorage.debug = 'flyte:adminEntity' to only see decoded Flyte Admin API requests).

In the common hosting arrangement, all API requests will be to the same origin serving the client application, making CORS unnecessary. For any requests which do not share the same origin value, the client application will route requests through a special endpoint on the NodeJS server. One example would be hosting the Admin API on a different domain than the console. Another example is when fetching execution data from external storage such as S3. This is done to minimize the amount of extra configuration required for ingress to the Admin API and data storage, as well as to simplify local development of the console without the need to grant CORS access to localhost. To proxy requests for local development, set ADMIN_API_URL to http://localhost:3000/cors_proxy/http://<admin-host>:<admin-port>.

The requests and responses are piped through the NodeJS server with minimal overhead. However, it is still recommended to host the Admin API and console on the same domain to prevent unnecessary load on the NodeJS server and extra latency on API requests due to the additional hop.