Hosting excalibur on the web

[checkaayush]

Have you thought about hosting Excalibur for ease of use by non-technical people?

Was expecting tryexcalibur.com to be a hosted version but found a landing page instead.

Let me know if I can help.

[cmutel]

Alternatively, as each time I try to install this I run into errors with some part of the tool chain - maybe a blessed Docker image that would make it trivial to get Excalibur running as a web service?

[checkaayush]

@cmutel There's already a PR to do exactly that: #35.

@vinayak-mehta Do you need help with reviewing this? Would be a much needed addition to the tool.

[vinayak-mehta]

Was expecting tryexcalibur.com to be a hosted version but found a landing page instead.

@checkaayush sorry for not replying earlier. I would be totally up for hosting an online version to make it easier to use. Do you have any ideas wrt where to host etc? We'll probably have to put in some usage limits per user if we decide to go use the free tier on AWS, for example.

@vinayak-mehta Do you need help with reviewing this? Would be a much needed addition to the tool.

Would definitely love your help! @cmutel has already added some points. After your review, I'll take another look and merge it.

[answerquest]

Hi, I use DigitalOcean's basic ubuntu server droplet for deploying apps on web and it does a great job. I've deployed several python and other programs on the same server: example1, example2. We don't actually need docker - I prefer not to go there because I want to be able to make changes to my code files etc whenever needed and not have it like a black box.

Anything that can work on your local ubuntu laptop on localhost:port can work on the www as well. The key requirement for web-friendliness is to be able to control which port number is used by the app. So, does Excalibur have a custom port number key? Can we build one if it's not there? In my server, port 5000 is occupied.

[ForestJohnson]

I did make a docker image of this thingy for my own use

https://git.sequentialread.com/forest/excalibur-docker

do with that what you will...