Holoscape

A complete end-user deployment of a Holochain conductor with UI for administration and a run-time for hApp UIs.

Why?

Holoscape makes using hApps a piece of cake.

As a hApp user:

• You install Holoscape which comes with all the Holochain binaries and sets up and maintains your Holochain conductor config (so you don't neede to know what that even means)
• It runs in the background with a system tray icon to access all configuration dialogs
• You install hApps through hApp Bundles with just a few clicks
• You open hApp UIs through the system tray menu
• DNA instances keep running in the conductor even when you close a hApp UI

As a hApp developer:

• Getting your hApp deployed has become a lot easier
• You have your user install Holoscape
• You put all your DNAs and UIs into a hApp bundle
• You share the hApp bundle with your users

But there is more... During development of your hApp it would be nice to see what actually is going on in your DNA's source chain and which entries are held in the DHT.

Holoscape as a debug view that shows state dumps and all Holochain core redux actions:

(so it doubles as a holoscope...)

Setup for development

$ git clone https://github.com/holochain/holoscape.git
$ cd holoscape
# Run all commands for this project while cd'd in this directory

Holoscape needs both binaries out of the holochain-rust repository: hc and holochain.

Depending on the OS, it expects to find either hc-linux and holochain-linux or hc-darwin and holochain-darwin in the application directory (the root of the repository during development).

For development you can either build those yourself or get them through nix-shell like this:

$ nix-shell https://github.com/holochain/holoscape/archive/develop.tar.gz --run holoscape

To flush all holoscape data with the nix shell:

$ nix-shell https://github.com/holochain/holoscape/archive/develop.tar.gz --run holoscape-flush

Run for development

npm start

Personas

Persona's allow you to run multiple instances of Holoscape. This is useful for a few reasons:

• Networks: Because each Holoscape instance is configured to communicate over one network, you can use this run instances on different networks.
• Testing: this makes it easy to spin up multiple nodes on the same network for testing purposes.

You can select personas setting the HOLOSCAPE_PERSONA environment variable at startup. Note that the first time you launch Holoscape with a new persona you must also use the HOLOSCAPE_ADMIN_PORT environment to specify a unique port for the instance of Holoscape to communicate with it's conductor, like this:

HOLOSCAPE_PERSONA=my_persona HOLOSCAPE_ADMIN_PORT=4436

Note that this value is set in the conductor config file which on linux systems you will find at ~/.config/Holoscape-<persona>/conductor-config.toml.

Releasing

A stand-alone Electron package can be built with

npm run build-linux

or

npm run build-mac

The build script expects above mentioned binaries (holochain-<platform> and hc-<platform>) to be present in the root directory and puts them into the final package with everything else. In order to have Linux builds be portable across all Linux distributions, releases need to have a static build of those binaries. Currently we use this bash script to make our static builds. Please not this is subject to change. (How we used to do it: There is a branch in holochain-rust/static-holoscape-build that gets tracked and automatically build and statically linked. Binaries can be downloaded here: https://hydra.holo.host/jobset/holochain-rust/static-holoscape-build.)

Contribute

Holochain is an open source project. We welcome all sorts of participation and are actively working on increasing surface area to accept it. Please see our contributing guidelines for our general practices and protocols on participating in the community, as well as specific expectations around things like code formatting, testing practices, continuous integration, etc.

License

Copyright (C) 2019, Holochain Foundation

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the license p rovided in the LICENSE file (GPLv3). This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, bu t WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Note: We are considering other 'looser' licensing options (like MIT license) but at this stage are using GPL while we're getting the matter sorted out. See this article for some of our thinking on licensing for distributed application frameworks.