Summary:
Currently, we have two ways that we deliver Grist. One is grist-core,
which has simple defaults and is relatively easy for third parties to
deploy. The second is our internal build for our SaaS, which is the
opposite. For self-managed Grist, a planned paid on-premise version
of Grist, I adopt the following approach:
* Use the `grist-core` build mechanism, extending it to accept an
overlay of extra code if present.
* Extra code is supplied in a self-contained `ext` directory, with
an `ext/app` directory that is of same structure as core `app`
and `stubs/app`.
* The `ext` directory also contains information about extra
node dependencies needed beyond that of `grist-core`.
* The `ext` directory is contained within our monorepo rather than
`grist-core` since it may contain material not under the Apache
license.
Docker builds are achieved in our monorepo by using the `--build-context`
functionality to add in `ext` during the regular `grist-core` build:
```
docker buildx build --load -t gristlabs/grist-ee --build-context=ext=../ext .
```
Incremental builds in our monorepo are achieved with the `build_core.sh` helper,
like:
```
buildtools/build_core.sh /tmp/self-managed
cd /tmp/self-managed
yarn start
```
The initial `ext` directory contains material for snapshotting to S3.
If you build the docker image as above, and have S3 access, you can
do something like:
```
docker run -p 8484:8484 --env GRIST_SESSION_SECRET=a-secret \
--env GRIST_DOCS_S3_BUCKET=grist-docs-test \
--env GRIST_DOCS_S3_PREFIX=self-managed \
-v $HOME/.aws:/root/.aws -it gristlabs/grist-ee
```
This will start a version of Grist that is like `grist-core` but with
S3 snapshots enabled. To release this code to `grist-core`, it would
just need to move from `ext/app` to `app` within core.
I tried a lot of ways of organizing self-managed Grist, and this was
what made me happiest. There are a lot of trade-offs, but here is what
I was looking for:
* Only OSS-code in grist-core. Adding mixed-license material there
feels unfair to people already working with the repo. That said,
a possible future is to move away from our private monorepo to
a public mixed-licence repo, which could have the same relationship
with grist-core as the monorepo has.
* Minimal differences between self-managed builds and one of our
existing builds, ideally hewing as close to grist-core as possible
for ease of documentation, debugging, and maintenance.
* Ideally, docker builds without copying files around (the new
`--build-context` functionality made that possible).
* Compatibility with monorepo build.
Expressing dependencies of the extra code in `ext` proved tricky to
do in a clean way. Yarn/npm fought me every step of the way - everything
related to optional dependencies was unsatisfactory in some respect.
Yarn2 is flexible but smells like it might be overreach. In the end,
organizing to install non-core dependencies one directory up from the
main build was a good simple trick that saved my bacon.
This diff gets us to the point of building `grist-ee` images conveniently,
but there isn't a public repo people can go look at to see its source. This
could be generated by taking `grist-core`, adding the `ext` directory
to it, and pushing to a distinct repository. I'm not in a hurry to do that,
since a PR to that repo would be hard to sync with our monorepo and
`grist-core`. Also, we don't have any licensing text ready for the `ext`
directory. So leaving that for future work.
Test Plan: manual
Reviewers: georgegevoian, alexmojaki
Reviewed By: georgegevoian, alexmojaki
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D3415
Paul Fitzpatrick
fflorent
Florent