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Setting up your own simplex server

Here are three ways to set up your own simplex server:

  • On a VirtualBox (or other) virtual machine with Vagrant
  • On a Debian-based Linux distribution with an installation file
  • By hand

Vagrant

Vagrant is a technology for setting up a virtual machine simply.

Launch simplex in a virtual machine with vagrant up. Stop it with vagrant halt. If you have VirtualBox installed, everything should work. If you have some other virtualization technology, you might have to alter the Vagrantfile to make sure that your virtual machine has enough memory to build Rcpp. The virtual machine makes simplex available (with eight parallel instances) on [https://localhost:8080/simplex/].

.deb installation file

Those running a Debian-based Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu) can install simplex with the simplex.deb installation file.

Firstly you can run:

sudo apt install ./simplex.deb

to install simplex on your machine with all its dependencies.

ensuring availability

simplex should now be available on [http://localhost/simplex/]. If not, your nginx installation is probably not including its location block, which is installed in /etc/nginx/app.d/simplex.conf. Edit the file /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and find the server block containing the line listen 80 default_server; (or, if you have set up your own server, you can add this line to whichever one you like). Add the line include /etc/nginx/app.d/*.conf;, so that the block looks a bit like this:

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        # vvv ADDED THIS LINE HERE TO ENABLE SIMPLEX
        include /etc/nginx/app.d/*.conf;

        root /var/www/html;

        # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name _;

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

Now restart nginx with sudo systemctl restart nginx and see if simplex appears at the above URL. You can turn simplex off with sudo simplexctl stop and back on again with sudo simplexctl start. Stop it from starting on boot with sudo simplexctl disable and enable starting on boot with sudo simplexctl enable. You can see how all the instances are doing with sudo simplexctl status.

configuring simplex

simplex can support many users at once. However, R itself is single-threaded, so if many users try to run their calculations at the same time, each calculation will run in turn. This means that some users might end up waiting a long time, even if more processing power is available on the server.

This can be mitigated by running many different instances of simplex in parallel.

You can configure simplex to run any number of instances between 1 and 99 with the following commands:

sudo configureSimplex.sh 8
sudo simplexctl start

Here we are requesting 8 instances. The configureSimplex.sh script stops simplex, so in the next line we start it again.

By default, simplex takes over port numbers 39101, 39102, 39103... (one port per instance you have). If these interfere with other processes on your system, you can configure simplex to use a different starting port number like this:

sudo configureSimplex.sh 8 4000
sudo simplexctl start

Here we are specifying ports 4000 to 4007.

uninstallation

If installed with this method, you can uninstall simplex with sudo apt remove simplex.

updating the package (for developers)

The .deb file is defined by the files in the simplex directory. If you change these files, you can update the .deb file with sudo dpkg -b simplex/.

By hand

Here is a way to set up a mirror on a Linux machine using the following ingredients:

  • Ubuntu
  • nginx
  • R
  • git
  • crontab

Instructions for offline use are provided in the main README file.

Install nginx, R and git

If these packages are not installed on your system already, then you can add them with the following commands:

sudo apt-get install nginx git r-base r-base-dev

Create a user to run simplex

It can be advantageous to have a non-human user running simplex over the web so as to limit any damage should one behave badly. For our purposes we will create one called wwwrunner:

sudo useradd -mr wwwrunner

Set up simplex for this user

The version of simplex that gets run will be the version that our new user wwwrunner has installed.

Install simplex for this user:

sudo -Hu wwwrunner sh -c "mkdir ~/R"
sudo -Hu wwwrunner sh -c "echo R_LIBS_USER=~/R > ~/.Renviron"
sudo -Hu wwwrunner Rscript -e "install.packages(pkgs='remotes',lib='~/R')"
sudo -Hu wwwrunner Rscript -e \
     "remotes::install_github(repo=c('tim-band/shinylight','pvermees/simplex'),lib='~/R')"

Create a systemd service for simplex

Copy the file simplex/DEBIAN/systemd/system/simplex@.service to /systemd/system/.

Copy the scripts onto your path

Copy the files in simplex/DEBIAN/usr/local/sbin/ to /usr/local/sbin/.

Now we can control simplex:

sudo simplexctl enable
sudo simplexctl start
sudo simplexctl status

Expose simplex with nginx

Copy the file simplex/DEBIAN/etc/nginx/app.d/simplex.conf to /etc/nginx/app.d/, and simplex/DEBIAN/etc/nginx/conf.d/simplex.conf to /etc/nginx/conf.d/.

As above in the section ensuring availability, ensure that your default server block in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default contains the line: include /etc/nginx/app.d/*.conf;. Now restart nginx:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Auto-updating

Copy the file simplex/DEBIAN/etc/cron.weekly/simplex to /etc/cron.weekly.

This will automatically synchronise shinylight and simplex with GitHub on every Sunday.

You can force an update yourself by running the script as the root user:

sudo /usr/local/sbin/updateSimplex.sh

Configuring simplex

See the section configuring simplex under .deb installation file above to find out how to horizontally scale simplex for more parallelism.