Welcome to saltant!

saltant is a web app for running task instances which are distributed (run on many machines), containerized (run within Docker or Singularity containers), and mutable (change often).

To accomplish this, saltant uses a few main pieces of tech:

• Celery, a distributed task queue
• Django, a web framework
• Django REST framework, a RESTful API framework for Django
• Docker, a containerization framework
• PostgreSQL, an object-relational database server
• RabbitMQ, a messaging broker
• Singularity, another containerization framework

The source code for saltant is located at github.com/saltant-org/saltant and is licensed under the MIT License. Additionally, a saltant API reference is available at saltant-org.github.io/saltant.

See also:

• saltant-cli, a saltant CLI
• saltant-py, a saltant SDK for Python

Using saltant

• Overview
  • Containers
  • Task types
  • Task queues
  • Task instances
• API usage
  • Authentication
• Running Celery workers
  • Setup
  • Starting a worker process
  • Shipping logs
• A working example
  • Objective
  • An anagram generator
  • Getting input arguments
  • Containerizing our code
  • Defining a Docker container
  • Defining a Singularity container
  • Saving anagram results
  • Logging the saltant way
  • POST-ing the task to our saltant server
  • Running the task
  • Addendum: filesystem interfacing with Singularity

Hosting saltant

• Introduction
• Development server setup
  • Cloning the saltant repository
  • Setting up a virtual environment
  • Setting up environment variables
  • Setting up a PostgreSQL database
  • Setting up an admin account
  • Generating an admin API authentication token
  • Setting up a local RabbitMQ server
  • Setting up an S3 bucket for logs
  • Running the server
• Production server setup
  • Allowing incoming network traffic
  • Setting up production environment variables
  • Collecting static files
  • Hosting saltant on a socket with uWSGI
  • Serving the socket with nginx
  • Let’s encrypt!
  • Hosting RabbitMQ on a network
  • Hosting the RabbitMQ management console with SSL
  • Securing RabbitMQ with SSL
  • Hosting Flower with SSL
  • Setting up Rollbar error tracking
  • Final thoughts