VisFlow - Web-Based Dataflow Framework for Visual Data Exploration

This is the installation guide for building and deploying new VisFlow instance. For VisFlow usage, please see the documentation.

VisFlow uses yarn to build. Run yarn install first to install all node dependencies.

Development Web Client and Server

The VisFlow system has three essential components:

• web client
• server
• mongoDB

Make sure mongod is running in the environment where VisFlow is running. See mongoDB to set up mongoDB.

The web client and server need to be built before deployment.

Env configuration

Before building production or running the development system, configure the execution environment in two .env files.

client/.env:

BASE_URL=/
TIME_ZONE=America/New_York

server/.env:

DATA_PATH=/data/visflow
MONGODB_URI=mongodb://localhost:27017/visflow
ALLOW_ORIGIN=http://localhost:8080;http://localhost:3000;https://visflow.org
SESSION_SECRET=123456
PORT=3000

DATA_PATH must be a directory writable by nodejs.

Development Web Client and Server

To run the web client and server in development:

yarn --cwd client start
yarn --cwd server start

By default, the dev client runs at port 8080 and the dev server runs at port 3000. In server/.env, the port of the client must be an allowed origin for the dev server to respond to dev client requests.

Production Web Client and Server

To build the production client and server:

yarn --cwd client build
yarn --cwd server build

The distribution files for the client are located at client/dist. The distribution files for the server are located at server/dist. You may also use yarn serve to run the server. The server must be run with NODE_ENV=production.

Documentation

To build the documentation:

yarn --cwd docs build

The distribution files for the documentation are located at docs/dist.

FlowSense Setup

Setting up FlowSense is currently not supported.