atomic-server

Guide for Atomic-Server contributors

First things first: I’m glad you’re reading this! Join our Discord to chat with other people in the Atomic Data community. If you encounter any issues, add them to the Github issue tracker. Same goes for feature requests. PR’s are welcome, too! Note that opening a PR means agreeing that your code becomes distributed under the MIT license.

If you want to share some thoughts on the Atomic Data specification, please drop an issue in the Atomic Data docs repo. Check out the Roadmap if you want to learn more about our plans and the history of the project.

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• Running \& compiling
  • Running locally (with local development browser)
  • IDE setup (VSCode)
  • Compilation using Earthly
  • Improve local compilation speed
  • Cross compilation
• Git policy
  • Open a PR
  • Branching
• Testing
• Performance monitoring / benchmarks
  • Tracing
    • Tracing with OpenTelemetry (and Jaeger)
    • Tracing with Chrome
  • Criterion benchmarks
  • Drill
• Responsible disclosure / Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
• Releases, Versioning and Tagging
  • CI situation
  • Publishing manually - doing the CI’s work
    • Building and publishing binaries
    • Publishing to Cargo
    • Publishing server to Docker
    • Deploying to atomicdata.dev
    • Publishing atomic-cli to WAPM

Running & compiling

TL;DR Clone the repo and run cargo run from each folder (e.g. cli or server).

Running locally (with local development browser)

• Run cargo run to start the server
• Go to browser, run pnpm install (if you haven’t already), and run pnpm dev to start the browser
• Visit your localhost in your locally running atomic-data-browser instance: (e.g. http://localhost:5173/app/show?subject=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost)
• use cargo watch -- cargo run to automatically recompile atomic-server when you update JS assets in browser

IDE setup (VSCode)

This project is primarily being developed in VSCode. That doesn’t mean that you should, too, but it means you’re less likely to run into issues.

• Tasks: The /.vscode directory contains various tasks (open command palette => search “run task”)
• Debugging: Install the CodeLLDB plugin, and press F5 to start debugging. Breakpoints, inspect… The good stuff.
• Extensions: That same directory will give a couple of suggestions for extensions to install.

Compilation using Earthly

There are earthfiles in browser and in atomic-server. These can be used by Earthly to build all steps, including a full docker image.

• Make sure earthly is installed
• earthly --org ontola -P --satellite henk --artifact +e2e/test-results +pipeline
• earthly --org ontola -P --satellite henk --artifact +build-server/atomic-server ./output/atomicserver

Improve local compilation speed

• Use the mold linker + create a .cargo/config.toml and add [build] rustflags = ["-C", "link-arg=-fuse-ld=lld"]
• Note: this is primarily for development on linux systems, as mold for macOS requires a paid license

Cross compilation

If you want to build atomic-server for some other target (e.g. building for linux from macOS), you can use the cross crate, which requires docker.

cargo install cross
# make sure docker is running!
cross build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --bin atomic-server --release

Note that this is also done in the earthly file.

Git policy

Open a PR

• Make sure your branch is up to date with develop.
• Open a PR against develop.
• Make sure all relevant tests / lint pass.

Branching

Create new branches off develop. When an issue is ready for PR, open PR against develop.

Testing

# Make sure nextest is installed
cargo install cargo-nextest
# Runs all tests
# NOTE: run this from the root of the workspace, or else feature flags may be excluded
cargo nextest run
# Run specific test(s)
cargo nextest run test_name_substring
# End-to-end tests, powered by PlayWright and Atomic-Data-Browser
# First, run the server
cargo run
# now, open new terminal window
cd server/e2e_tests/ && npm i && npm run test
# if things go wrong, debug!
pnpm run test-query {testname}

Performance monitoring / benchmarks

We want to make Atomic Server as fast as possible. For doing this, we have at least three tools: tracing, criterion and drill.

Tracing

There are two ways you can use tracing to get insights into performance.

Tracing with OpenTelemetry (and Jaeger)

• Run the server with --trace opentelemetry and add --log-level trace to inspect more events
• Run an OpenTelemetry compatible service, such as Jaeger. See docker run command below or use the vscode task.
• Visit jaeger: http://localhost:16686

docker run -d --platform linux/amd64 --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HTTP_PORT=9411 \
  -p 5775:5775/udp \
  -p 6831:6831/udp \
  -p 6832:6832/udp \
  -p 5778:5778 \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 14268:14268 \
  -p 9411:9411 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.6

Tracing with Chrome

• Use the tracing::instrument macro to make functions traceable. Check out the tracing docs for more info.
• Run the server with the --trace chrome flag.
• Close the server. A trace-{unix-timestamp}.json file will be generated in the current directory.
• Open this file with https://ui.perfetto.dev/ or chrome://tracing. This will show you a flamegraph that you can zoom into.

Criterion benchmarks

We have benchmarks in the /lib/benchmarks folder. Make sure there’s a benchmark for the thing you’re trying to optimize, run the benchmark, then make some changes to the code, then run the benchmark again. You should be able to see the difference in performance.

# install criterion
cargo install cargo-criterion
# go to atomic-server root folder - don't run benchmarks in `./lib`
cd ..
# run benchmark
cargo criterion
# or if that does not work
cargo bench --all-features

Drill

HTTP-level benchmarking tool. Sends a ton of requests, measures how long it takes.

cargo install drill
drill -b benchmark.yml --stats

Responsible disclosure / Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure

If you encounter serious security risks, please refrain from posting these publicly in the issue tracker. We could minimize the impact by first patching the issue, publishing the patch, and then (after 30 days) disclose the bug. So please first send an e-mail to joep@ontola.io describing the issue, and then we will work on fixing it as soon as possible.

Releases, Versioning and Tagging

1. Commit changes
2. Make sure all tests run properly
3. Test, build and update the /browser versions (package.json files, see ./browser/contributing.md)
4. Use cargo workspaces version patch --no-git-commit (and maybe replace patch with the minor) to update all cargo.toml files in one command. You’ll need to cargo install cargo-workspaces if this command is not possible.
5. Publish to cargo: cargo publish. First lib, then cli and server.
6. Publish to npm (see browser/contribute.md)
7. Update the CHANGELOG.md files (browser and root)

The following should be triggered automatically:

• Push the v* tag, a Release will automatically be created on Github with the binaries. This will read CHANGELOG.md, so make sure to add the changes from there.
• The main action required on this repo, is to update the changelog and tag releases. The tags trigger the build and publish processes in the CI.

Note:

• We use semver, and are still quite far from 1.0.0.
• The version for atomic-lib is the most important, and dictates the versions of cli and server. When lib changes minor version, cli and server should follow.

CI situation

• Github Action for push: builds + tests + docker (using earthly, see Earthfile)
• Github Action for tag: create release + publish binaries

Publishing manually - doing the CI’s work

If the CI scripts for some reason do not do their job (buildin releases, docker file, publishing to cargo), you can follow these instructions:

Building and publishing binaries

1. cargo build --release
2. Create a release on github, add the binaries

Publishing to Cargo

1. Update the versions in cargo.toml files using Semantic Versioning.
2. run cargo publish in lib, than you can run the same in cli and server

OR

1. Install cargo install cargo-release and run cargo release patch

Publishing server to Docker

DockerHub has been setup to track the master branch, but it does not tag builds other than latest.

1. build: docker build . -t joepmeneer/atomic-server:v0.20.4 -t joepmeneer/atomic-server:latest
2. run, make sure it works: docker run joepmeneer/atomic-server:latest
3. publish: docker push -a joepmeneer/atomic-server

or:

1. build and publish various builds (warning: building to ARM takes long!): docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64 . -t joepmeneer/atomic-server:v0.20.4 -t joepmeneer/atomic-server:latest --push. Note that including the armv7 platform linux/arm/v7 currently fails.

Deploying to atomicdata.dev

1. Run the deploy Github action

or do it manually:

1. cd server
2. cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --bin atomic-server (if it fails, use cross, see above)
3. scp ../target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/atomic-server atomic:~/atomic/server/atomic-server-v0.{version}
4. ssh atomic (@joepio manages server)
5. service atomic restart

# logs
journalctl -u atomic.service
# logs, since one hour, follow
journalctl -u atomic.service --since "1 hour ago" -f

Publishing atomic-cli to WAPM

1. Install wasmer and cargo-wasi.
2. cd cli
3. run cargo wasi build --release --no-default-features (note: this fails, as ring does not compile to WASI at this moment)
4. wapm publish

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