User Interface (Jobson UI)

The core jobson server only hosts a JSON/websocket API for Jobson. jobson-ui is a set of static web assets that should be installed separately on a production-grade webserver (e.g. apache, nginx).

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Overview

jobson-ui is a set of static web assets that should be hosted on a standard webserver. This enables admins to administer the user-facing API of jobson with their own standard security/caching/authentication apporaches.

At runtime, browser clients go through the following steps:

• Clients download index.html (from jobson-ui) from the webserver

• <script> tags in the HTML cause clients to download associated javascript from the webserver

• The javascript makes clients download config.json from the webserver

• config.json contains UI configuration options, including an apiPrefix property, which tells clients what to prefix jobson API requests with

• Subsequent jobson API calls are prefixed with apiPrefix (e.g. /api/{some-req})

This guide demonstrates configuring nginx to serve jobson-ui as described.

Optional: Boot jobson somewhere

Deploying the UI doesn’t require a running jobson server. However, for the sake of testing, this guide assumes you have a jobson server running at localhost:8080:

jobson serve config.yml  # config.yml is configured to serve on port 8080

Get jobson-ui Assets

Pre-packaged distributions (debian, unix) of the jobson platform include the assets at /share/jobson/ui/html. Those assets are “ready to go” and should be copied/linked to an appropriate location (below).

The jobson project build also uploads jobson-ui as an independent artifact. If you just want the UI, you can download it from the releases page.

Unpack/Move Assets to Webserver Root

For this install guide, we will copy the assets to /var/www/jobson-ui:

cp -r /usr/share/jobson/ui/html /var/www/jobson-ui

Optional: Edit config.json

If you want to change the apiPrefix, edit the UI configuration file:

nano /var/www/jobson/config.json

This will cause jobson API requests to go elsewhere. For this guide, we assume the default value (/api).

Configure nginx

• Create an nginx config file for the site at /etc/nginx/sites-available/jobson-ui:

server {
	listen 8090;
	listen [::]:8090;

	root /var/www/jobson-ui;

	location / {
		# First attempt to serve request as file, then
		# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
		try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
	}

	location /api {
		# Any requests beginning with /api should be forwarded
		# to Jobson
		proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;

		# The Jobson server itself doesn't take an /api prefix
		# (it's just used for routing), so drop it.
		rewrite ^/api/(.*) /$1 break;

		# Enable websockets, which are used for dynamic updates
		# (Jobson UI doesn't *require* them though).
		proxy_http_version 1.1;
		proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
		proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
		proxy_read_timeout 86400;
	}
}

• Enable the site configuration:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/jobson-ui jobson-ui

• Reload nginx:

nginx -s reload

Optional: Load the UI in a Browser

Try loading the UI in a browser:

xdg-open http://localhost

Which, if jobson is running, should work fine.