Running Locally

Running Hippo on your machine requires three steps:

  1. Install WAGI
  2. Boot Bindle
  3. Boot hippo-server

Install WAGI

Hippo deploys applications using handlers following a Common Gateway Interface like approach called WebAssembly Gateway Interface (WAGI).

An incoming client HTTP request is sent to the handler, which launches the application as a WebAssembly module and passes the HTTP request to it using the WAGI protocol. The output of the application - usually in the form of HTML - is then returned by the WebAssembly module, again using WAGI protocol, and the handler relays the output back to the client as an HTTP response.

Download the latest release of WAGI. Extract the WAGI binary and move it to a directory that is in your $PATH.

$ mv wagi /usr/local/bin/

No further configuration is necessary.

Boot Bindle

Applications are bundled up as a bindle. Bindles are collected together in a bindle server that you can search. Hippo uses bindle under the hood for storing and organizing applications.

First, set up a local installation of Bindle. This is where Hippo will publish revisions of your application.

  1. Download the latest release of bindle. Extract the bindle and bindle-server binaries and move them to a directory on your $PATH.
$ mv bindle bindle-server /usr/local/bin/

To start the server, simply run

$ bindle-server --unauthenticated

If you would like to see the available options, use the --help command.

By default, bindle-server listens on port 8080. You can verify it is running by issuing a request to Bindle:

$ bindle --server http://localhost:8080/v1 search
=== Showing results 1 to 0 of 0 (limit: 50)

Boot hippo-server

Next, we will compile hippo-server from source.

Prerequisites

Install the following to compile hippo-server from source:

Building

hippo-server is written in C# using the ASP.NET framework. The Web UI uses Angular as the front-end web framework and Bulma as the design framework, which (along with some other packages) is managed via npm.

To build the project, run:

$ git clone https://github.com/deislabs/hippo
$ cd hippo/src/Web
$ dotnet build

Then run hippo-server, pointing at your local Bindle instance:

$ export BINDLE_URL=http://localhost:8080/v1
$ dotnet run

Once that’s done, proceed to Step 2: Deploy an Application