Awesome Analytics Apps Template

The purpose of this project is to enable you and your team to quickly get up and running building your own site of awesome analytics apps using the tools you know and love.

A site with a look and feel similar to awesome-panel.org.

The site can serve apps developed in

• code files (.py) or jupyter notebooks (.ipynb).
• Bokeh, Panel or Jupyter IpyWidgets

It can also serve pages and apps developed in Markdown, HTML and any Javascript framework. It can even serve REST API endpoints.

Gif Intro Video

In this Youtube Intro video I provide an introduction to the Template.

Installation

Below we will describe

• installation via pip or conda.
• how to test the installation
• how to serve the site

Prerequisites

• Python >= 3.7 from python.org or Anaconda

It will help a lot if you have experience

• building apps using Bokeh, IpyWidgets or Panel.
• working in
  • an editor or IDE like Spyder, PyCharm or VS Code or
  • a Jupyter Notebook environment.
• working on the command line
• working with virtual environments

If you want to use Docker then you will need to install Docker Desktop.

Cloning the Template

Go to the awesome-analytics-apps-template and either "Clone", "Download ZIP" or "Use this template".

When done navigate to the root of the project.

Install Using Pip

Move to the root of the project. Create a virtual environment named .venv.

python -m venv .venv

Activate the virtual environment using something like source .venv/Scripts/activate (bash) or call .venv/Scripts/activate (cmd.exe).

Update pip

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Install the requirements for local development and testing.

pip install -r requirements/local.txt

Install using Conda

conda create --name mysite

You can of course replace mysite with the name you prefer.

conda activate mysite

conda install pip

python -m  pip install -r requirements/local.txt

Enabling Jupyterlab

To use Jupyterlab you need to run

jupyter labextension install @pyviz/jupyterlab_pyviz

Setting the Python Path

In order to be able to run python or pytest on specific files you need to set your PYTHONPATH to the root of the project.

For example in bash like

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/project

There are many other ways to set environment variable and they depend on your workflow and use case.

• VS Code
• PyCharm
• Spyder: Nothing to do. The root of your project is automatically added.

Test the installation

Test the installation by running the command

invoke test.all

If successfull you will see something like

All Tests Passed Successfully
=============================

Start the Server

Assuming your PYTHONPATH has been set to the root of the repository you can serve your site via

invoke site.serve

or

python src/site.py

or

python -m src.site

You should then be able to open localhost:5007 and check out the site.

Development and Testing

Customizing the Site

The entrypoint for customizing the Site is the site.toml file.

You can customize for example the name of the site.

By default this is located in the src/config folder. You can change the default config folder via the SITE_CONFIG environment variable. For example by setting it to src/config_prod.

Adding More Apps

You create a new app by adding it as a subfolder to the src/apps folder and then configuring the new app in the applications.toml file.

To define and serve the app you need to add it to the applications.toml file.

• If you need to add a new Author or Owner you can add him or her via the persons.toml file.

Best Practice for adding Apps

• Don't place single files directly in src/apps
• Don't nest your apps further into for example src/apps/football/messi/ and src/apps/football/ronaldo/. Instead use src/apps/football_messi/ and src/apps/football_ronaldo/.
• Name the main file of your app app.py
• Always place app related tests directly in the app folder either as a single test.py file or as a test subfolder.
• Always add __init__.py in your app and test folders. Tools like pytest, mypy and pylint need them for "navigating" your project.
• Always clean all notebooks before git commit. Follow the guide How to clear the Jupyter Notebook outputs automatically? or manually clean your notebooks using invoke notebook.clean.

This will provide the best experience for navigation, continued development, maintainence, refactoring and moving apps when your site grows.

• If the app is a single file. Just add that single file.
• If the app consists of multiple files. Just add a subfolder with the files.

Remember to Update the Package Requirements

Please note that if start using additional packages, then they should be added to the the relevant file in the requirements/base.txt file.

It's recommended to freeze the version. For example to plotly==4.14.1.

Using Static assets

For convenience the site is configured to serve any assets in the src/assets folder. This means that you can refer to for example assets/images/thumbnails/gallery.png in ..html and or .toml files.

When your site grows and needs more assets its often recommended to store and serve them seperately from your site. But it might not be the fastest solution, c.f. Self-host Your Static Assets. But at least storing the assets somewhere differently than in your repo might speed up cloning your repo.

Customizing the Menu

By default any app added to the applications.toml file will be added to the menu in the sidebar of the templates.

If you want to customize this further your can do this in the src/shared/_menu.py file.

The Command Line Interface (CLI)

We use Invoke as a cli/ task runner to speed up our work flow. Tasks are defined in the task module. Available tasks can be listed using the --list flag and more information can be obtained using the --help flag.

$ invoke --list
Available tasks:

  docker.build                          Build Docker image
  docker.export-test-results            Copies the test_results from the test image to the local folder 'test_results'
  docker.run                            Run the (prod) Docker image interactively.
  docker.serve                          Start the serve and serve the apps.
  docker.system-prune                   The docker system prune command will free up space
  docker.test                           Run the pre-commit tests inside the docker container
  notebook.clean-all (notebook.clean)   Strips all notebooks of output.
  site.serve                            Starts the Panel server and serves the apps
  test.all                              Runs isort, autoflake, black, pylint, mypy and pytest
  test.autoflake                        Runs autoflake to remove unused imports on all .py files recursively
  test.bandit                           Runs Bandit the security linter from PyCQA.
  test.black                            Runs black (autoformatter) on all .py files recursively
  test.isort                            Runs isort (import sorter) on all .py files recursively
  test.mypy                             Runs mypy (static type checker) on all .py files recursively
  test.pylint                           Runs pylint (linter) on all .py files recursively to identify coding errors
  test.pytest                           Runs pytest to identify failing tests
  test.show-coverage                    Open the code coverage report in a browser

Code Quality

To ensure a high coding standard we use

• Autoflake: Automatically removes unused imports and unused variables
• Isort: Isort your python imports for you so you don’t have to.
• Black: Black is the uncompromising Python code formatter
• Pylint: Pylint is a tool that checks for errors in Python code, tries to enforce a coding standard and looks for code smells.
• MyPy: MyPy is a static type checker for Python
• Pytest: The pytest framework makes it easy to write tests
• Coverage: Coverage.py is a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs
• Bandit: Bandit is a tool designed to find common security issues in Python code

We have setup invoke commands for ease of command line use. For available commands See

$ invoke --list=test
Available 'test' tasks:

  .all             Runs isort, autoflake, black, pylint, mypy and pytest
  .autoflake       Runs autoflake to remove unused imports on all .py files recursively
  .bandit          Runs Bandit the security linter from PyCQA.
  .black           Runs black (autoformatter) on all .py files recursively
  .isort           Runs isort (import sorter) on all .py files recursively
  .mypy            Runs mypy (static type checker) on all .py files recursively
  .pylint          Runs pylint (linter) on all .py files recursively to identify coding errors
  .pytest          Runs pytest to identify failing tests
  .show-coverage   Open the code coverage report in a browser

The best practice is to run invoke test.all and fix all errors before any commit. That will help you develop code which works and is long term maintainable.

Docker

The build process consist of building 3 images

base -> prod -> test

• base contains the basic requirements. It takes a long time to build but does not need to be rebuilt often.
• prod contains the base image and the package
• test is build from the prod image, runs the tests and saves test results in the folder /app/test_results. The test results are in the junit format so that they can be published and inspected in Azure Devops.

To build the prod image locally run

invoke docker.build

This will be using cached images and layers. The first time you run this you will need to add the --rebuild flag to build the base image initially.

To run the tests inside the prod image and export the results to ./test_results run

invoke docker.test

The above commands builds using the cached layers and images, i.e. it is fast. It is not as fast as running the tests locally via the command invoke test.all though.

When you need to build from scratch, then you should add the --rebuild flag.

For more information on available Invoke docker.* commands use the --list and --help flags.

Deployment

Deployment can be a complex topic. The most important resources for deployment are

• Panel Server Deployment
• Bokeh Settings.

Contributing

You are very welcome to contribute to this repo via Bugs, Feature Requests and Pull Requests.

Authors

• Marc Skov Madsen (Email, LinkedIn)

License

Apache 2

This was chosen since I like to citation as the creator of this. If the license is a problem for you let me know and we will find a solution.

Roadmap

• Create a tour of the project video
• add command to easily add a new app: invoke app.add my_new_app
• add logging
• improve menu generation to highlight active page
• Add examples of resources that open in new tab when clicked in the menu.
• Document FastListTemplate and FastGridTemplate
• add docs and examples on deployments
• add more app examples including ipywidgets examples
  • Lots of independent Plots with widgets layed out in list.
  • Machine Learning App. Just to show how well this use case is supported.
  • Show how to use css only (not template in notebook).
• add command to easily serve a specific app: invoke app.serve streaming_plots
• add flags --dev --show to site.serve and app.serve to enable server to reload when files changes.
• add docs app
• add rest api example
• restructure awesome-panel.org to follow the layout of this starter more precisely
• Add more templates: MarkdownTemplate, HTMLTemplate, AccordianTemplate
• Improve the instructions for installing via Conda.
  • I'm not normally a Conda user so contributions are very welcome.
• add support for Streamlit and Dash apps (if technically possible)