Running pyfora on a Single Box

You can easily run the pyfora backend locally on your machine using docker. Then you can connect pyfora to your local backend and start using it to speed up your python code.

What You Need to Get Started

OS

You’ll need an OS that can run docker. Currently this means:

  • A reasonably recent version of a 64-bit Linux distribution such as: Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, Fedora, Centos, Gentoo, Suse, Amazon, Oracle, etc.
  • OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” or newer.
  • Windows 7.1, 8/8.1 or newer.

Note

Docker only runs natively on Linux. On Windows and OS X it runs in a virtual machine. As a result, services running in docker containers need to be addressed using the VM’s IP address instead of localhost. The code examples in this tutorial use localhost and should be adjusted when running in non-Linux environments.

Docker

Docker is available for Linux, OS X, or Windows. To install docker on your machine, visit http://www.docker.com/, click the Get Started link, and follow the instructions.

On Linux you can also, optionally, follow these instructions to enable running docker commands without sudo. Note, however, that the docker daemon still runs as root - it just saves you five keystrokes when running docker commands.

Pull the pyfora Service Image

Once docker is installed you can pull the latest backend service image.

$ sudo docker pull ufora/service:latest

Important

If you are not using the most recent pyfora release and don’t want to upgrade, you will need to use a docker image compatible with your version. For example, if you are using pyfora version 0.3.1, you can pull and use the ufora/service:0.3.1 image.

Start the Backend Container

The command below starts an all-in-one docker container that runs all the backend services needed to support pyfora. To run a cluster on multiple machines in a local network, follow the instructions here.

Create a local directory for the backend services logs:

$ mkdir ~/ufora

And run (replacing the path /home/user with your own home directory path):

$ sudo docker run -d --name pyfora -p 30000:30000 -v /home/user/ufora:/var/ufora ufora/service

What does this do?

  • docker run launches a new docker container.
  • -d starts the container as daemon that runs in the background.
  • --name pyfora names the new container pyfora for easy reference in subsequent commands.
  • -p 30000:30000 maps port 30000 - pyfora’s default HTTP port - to the same port number in your host OS. This lets pyfora connect to the container using http://localhost:30000.
  • -v /home/user/ufora:/var/ufora mounts the local directory ~/ufora into /var/ufora within the container. This is where Ufora writes all of its log files.
  • ufora/service is the name of the Ufora service image to run. To use a version other than the latest, specify a version tag (e.g. ufora/service:0.2).

Verify

With your backend container running, you can now verify that pyfora is able to connect to it. Open python in your terminal and run:

>>> import pyfora
>>> pyfora.connect('http://localhost:30000')
<pyfora.Executor.Executor object at 0x7f518a7c1c90>

If no exceptions are thrown, you have a working pyfora cluster running on your machine!

This would be a good point to jump over to the Introduction to pyfora tutorial and learn more about coding with pyfora.

Stopping the pyfora Container

When you want to stop the pyfora service container, run:

$ sudo docker stop pyfora

This stops the container but preserves its state so it can be restarted at a later time. To permanently delete the container and all its state, run the following command after stopping the container:

$ sudo docker rm pyfora

To restart the container after it has been stopped:

$ sudo docker start pyfora