Sharing an HTTP Server¶

In this tutorial you will setup a board farm and share a simple HTTP server through the board farm. You will do this all on a single host, so you can interact with all the components easily and get a complete picture of the board farm.

First, start the board farm hub. The hub listens on port 2092 by default. Leave it running and continue in a new terminal window.

$ not-my-board hub

Now start the simple HTTP server, that will be shared with the board farm. Use the HTTP server from the Python standard library to serve a file named hello and accept connections on port 8080. Leave it running and continue in a new terminal window.

$ echo 'Hello, World!' > hello
$ python3 -m http.server 8080

Describe the place you want to export: It consists of a single part – the HTTP server:

tutorial-tcp-place.toml¶

port = 2192

[[parts]]
compatible = [ "tutorial-http-server" ]
tcp.http = { host = "localhost", port = 8080 }

Now register the place in the board farm. Leave the exporter running and continue in a new terminal window.

$ not-my-board export http://localhost:2092 ./tutorial-tcp-place.toml

Before you can reserve and attach the exported place you need to start a background process, that handles the communication with the board farm: the agent. This usually runs on a different host than the exporter, but as mentioned before, you run everything on a single host. Start the agent, leave it running and continue in a new terminal window.

$ sudo not-my-board agent http://localhost:2092

Now create a file with the import description. It says “I want a place, which has one part. This part has at least the tag tutorial-http-server and a TCP interface named http. Bind that interface to localhost, port 8081.”

tutorial-tcp.toml¶

[parts.http-server]
compatible = [ "tutorial-http-server" ]
tcp.http = { local_port = 8081 }

Use that import description to reserve and attach the place, that you previously exported.

$ sudo not-my-board attach ./tutorial-tcp.toml

Now the exported HTTP server is available through the board farm. Notice that the real HTTP server is listening on port 8080 and the agent exposes the imported HTTP server on port 8081:

$ curl http://localhost:8081/hello
Hello, World!