stencila/open : Stencila on the web

Purpose

This repository is the experimental web deployment of Stencila at http://open.stenci.la. It's for:

• people who want to use Stencila but don't want to download and install stencila/desktop
• integration with R and RStudio for users who have installed our stencila/r package
• us, to prototype and test a cloud based version of Stencila

This is one of the three deployments of Stencila, the others being:

• stencila/desktop: Stencila Desktop
• stencila/cli: Stencila CLI

Our initial focus is on Stencila Desktop, so you should download that if you want something less experimental!

Use

To use http://open.stenci.la you need to provide two URL parameters, address and peers i.e.

http://open.stenci.la/?address=<address>&peers=<peers>

The address parameter tells Stencila what file or folder you want to open. There are several address scheme prefixes, which specify where and how the file or folder should be fetched e.g.

• file:// : from the file system
• github://: from a Github repository
• dat://: from a Dat repository

The peers parameter tells Stencila which peers it should ask to open the file or folder. A peer is a Stencila Host from one of the three Stencila language packages for:

• R
• Python
• Node.js

Peers also provide alternative execution contexts. The address schemes available depends upon the capabilities of the peers you use.

For example, if you have installed one of the language packages locally then the URL might look like:

http://open.stenci.la/?address=file:///home/me/analysis.md&peers=http://127.0.0.1:2000/?ticket=Lj3EmiYJ2YuJ

where /home/me/analysis.md is the path to the file that you are working on, and http://127.0.0.1:2000/?ticket=Lj3EmiYJ2YuJ is the local URL of the Host running in the language runtime (the "ticket" is a single-use access token which helps limit access to that host).

Discuss

We ❤️ feedback. Create a new issue, add to existing issues or join the community discussion.

Develop

There's not a lot here to develop: this repo simply deploys the user interface code in stencila/stencila in a single HTML page. But if you want to hack on that:

git clone https://github.com/stencila/open.git
cd open
npm install
npm start

Then open the browser at http://127.0.0.1:8080, hack on index.html, refresh browser window, repeat.

Currently, this repo uses the alt-storers branch of stencila/stencila which has support for remote storage backends.

To deploy the page and the latest version of the Stencila build:

make deploy