2023.01.06

An App for the Pluriverse

A web application baseline for many possible worlds.

Table of Contents

0. Introduction
1. Set up local development environment
2. Set up production deployment flows and envs
3. Describe your domain via context.json
4. Create resources with HTML forms
5. Create connections between resources
6. Edit, update, and delete resources
7. Query data with REST endpoints
8. Query data with SPARQL
9. App-level access control with read-only data
10. Route-level access control
11. Resource-level access control

Introduction

This is a small starter application for rapid development of web projects to contemporary best practices in terms of server-side rendering and delivery of HTML, progressively enhanced JavaScript, clear and concise CSS, delivering high-performance and highly-accessible projects for the open web.

The application itself is build to the vision of a Transitional Web App with SvelteKit. The primary data format is built around JSON-LD, and data is stored in a standards-implementing triplestore. The application uses SPARQL to interface with the data store and provide efficient, graph-based data queries.

Developing projects with this applications follows the approaches described by Arturo Escobar and Keller Easterling respectively as “designing for the pluriverse” and “medium design”.

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up, deploying, and developing a project.

Set Up Local Development Environment

The starter kit uses Docker and Docker-Compose to run the application and the data store.

The application itself is built with SvelteKit. The data store is Oxigraph, but any triplestore that implements SPARQL will also work.

Download the Repository with Degit

npm install -g degit
degit git@github.com:nikolaswise/pluriverse.git my-project
cd my-project

Set the Environment Variables

The only variable that you need to set is sparql_endpoint. If you are using the standard docker-compose workflow provided, this will be http://oxigraph:7878. Copy the .env.example file into .env.

Alternatively, this can be any URL of a SPARQL endpoint. If you are using a remote endpoint like this, you can run the application by itself, without docker.

Run With Docker

Build the application image with Docker, than run it and the datastore image together:

docker build
docker-compose up

Run Without Docker

If you’re using a remote SPARQL endpoint, you can run the application by itself.

npm run dev

Set up production deployment flows and envs

We’ll be setting up a production data store and authentication proxy services on Fly.io.

Clone Configuration & Container Files

Get the sample dockerfile and fly configuration files.

degit https://github.com/nikolaswise/fly-triplestore my-store

Install Fly

Sign up for an account with Fly.io and install flyctl.

Deploy Oxigraph

First, deploy the Oxigraph container to your fly account.

cd my-store/oxigraph
fly launch

This will walk you through building the containers and deploying an application to Fly. At the prompts, select you region, and pick N to Upstash Redis and Postgres deployments.

Pick y to deploy the app now.

Aside: I went ahead and deleted one of the two default machines assigned to the app. I’m not sure how to make two volumes with data replication work, so Im just ignoring that for now.

Create a Volume

fly volumes create data --region sea --size 3

--region should match your app deployment region.

--size is an integer in GB.

Deploy the NGINX proxy

Scoot over the NGINX directory.

cd ../nginx/

Run the following with a username and password for the basic authentication.

htpasswd -Bbn <usename> <password> >> .htpasswd

Keep track of this password. It can’t be recovered.

Lastly, deploy the nginx app to Fly:

fly launch

Again, pick the same region, select N for Redis and Postgres, and y to deploy the app right now.

Celebrate

Visit the URL for the NGINX server that Fly provides. Use the credentials from the previous step to authenticate, and start playing with SPARQL queries.

Describe your domain

Now we should have a little application running, ready to create items and relationships.

• Ecosystem
  • sveltekit
  • Oxigraph
    • Triplestore
    • Auth Proxy
  • rdf-kv.js
  • sparql-helpers.js
  • svelte-magic-link.js
  • shipyard.svelte
• Getting Started
  • .env variables
    • sparql_endpoint
    • sparql_user
    • sparql_password
  • docker-compose build
  • docker-compose up . -->. --> -->
• Staging & Production Environments
  • https://pushbroom.co/hosting-a-triplestore
  • fly.io triplestore & auth proxy

ToDo

4. Stucco Software Repo for Fly.io triplestore config and code

Elsewhere