Template for a Beamline or Accelerator Domain Repository

This is where you will define all IOC instances for the beamline/domain.

The IOC instance will take the form of a subfolder in the iocs folder. This subfolder will container a `values.yaml`` file with at a minimum the URI of the generic IOC container image to use e.g.:

image: ghcr.io/epics-containers/ioc-adsimdetector-linux-runtime:23.10.1

This yaml file may also override any of the settings in the beamline helm chart's values file. See values.yaml

This defines the Generic IOC image that is used to launch the instance.

In addition to values.yaml there will be a config folder which will be mounted into the Generic IOC at runtime at `/epics/ioc/config``. This folder will contain the required files to make the generic IOC into a specific IOC instance.

For the details of the contents of the config folder see the default start.sh

How To Copy This Template Project

This is a template project. You can create your own beamline/domain from this template by clicking the green "Use this template" button on the GitHub page and then choosing Create a new repository. You will be asked to specify the name and GitHub organization for the new repository.

See GitHub documentation for templates

If you don't want to use GitHub, you can create you copy as follows:

create a new completely blank repository in your preferred git registry
copy the uri for this new repository
clone this template repository and replace its remote with the new repository uri
- git clone git@github.com:epics-containers/blxxi-template.git
- mv blxxi-template new-repository-name
- cd new-repository-name
- git remote set-url origin paste new repository uri here
- git push -u origin main

How To Make a New Unique Beamline or Domain

The following steps are required to make a new unique beamline or domain:

replace the contents of /README.md with the description of the beamline or domain
find all instances of xxi or ixx and replace the name containing that string with the new beamline or domain name. The files will be:
- values.yaml in each of the 3 helm charts in this repository
update /environment.sh so that it sets the correct values for the environment variables and loads the appropriate software to install and monitor IOCs for the beamline or domain. See below for more details.

DLS USERS

Instead of using this repository as a template, take a look at bl38p here: https://github.com/epics-containers/bl38p.

Environment.sh

The environment.sh file is used to set the environment variables and software required to interact with the beamline or domain. It will install the command line tool ec from epics-containers-cli and set the environment variables required to use it. You should set the following up in this file:

environment variables

The first section of the script sets up the environment variables.

The first 3 of the below must be set. The rest are optional.

EC_REGISTRY_MAPPING - This tells ec where to push generic IOC container images when building generic IOCs. It is a space separated list of git-registry-domian:container-registry-domain pairs.
EC_K8S_NAMESPACE - The namespace of the kubernetes cluster to use for deploying to the beamline or domain. If you are not using Kubernetes, you can leave this blank and ec will deploy to the local docker instance.
EC_DOMAIN_REPO - The URI this domain repository. This is used by ec to fetch tagged versions of IOC instances when deploying.
EC_LOG_URL - A Url with to the centralized logging system for the beamline or domain. Leave blank if you don't have one. Insert the string {ioc_name} to be replaced with the name of the IOC to log.
EC_CONTAINER_CLI - override automatic detection of the container cli to use. Valid values are docker or podman. If you are using a different container cli, which is compatible with docker you can set it here.
EC_DEBUG - set to true to enable debug output from all ec commands.

installing `ec`

The second section of the script installs ec from epics-containers-cli. If you have a python virtual environment set up before running this script, then you ' can leave this section alone.

However it is likely to be dependent on your infrastructure as to how you ensure that users have access to the ec command. Potentially you may choose to install it in a system wide location.

Configuring the Cluster

The third section of the script configures the cluster to be used by ec. If you are not using a Kubernetes cluster, you can delete this section.

Configuring the cluster will again be an infrastructure specific task. The example provided is how this is done at DLS where we have a cluster per beamline.

Essentially this part of script needs to set up your kubectl configuration to enable you to authenticate and connect to the cluster. It could also set the default namespace to use for deploying to the cluster - but this is for convenience only and not required by ec.

evalott100/blxxi