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Self-hosting a Project Index

Introduction

This section provides instructions on how to use Sysand CLI to host a private Sysand project index. The guide describes three ways to run the index:

Local Machine

This part of the guide focuses on running a Sysand index on your local machine for testing purposes, but the general approach applies to a more sophisticated production hosting as well. Get in touch with your IT administrator to get this running on your company’s infrastructure.

The easiest way to host a project index from which to install projects is to create a local Sysand index and expose it over HTTP.

Create Local Index

First, use the Sysand CLI to create a Sysand environment:

sysand index init

This will initialize a Sysand index in your current directory.

Add Project to the Index

You can now add the projects you want to share into the Sysand index. For example, if you have a MyProject.kpar file in your current directory, you can add it to the project index by (provided .project.json specifies publisher field):

sysand index add --kpar-path MyProject.kpar

This command will create an entry in the project index with the IRI of pkg:sysand/my-publisher/my-project-name that other people can then use to install your project. The publisher and name values are normalized values from fields in .project.json.

Repeat this step for as many times as you have projects (and their versions), giving a unique IRI for each different project.

Yank or Remove

You can also yank a project version, remove a project version, or remove the entire project. See yank command and remove command for more details.

Start an HTTP server

Once you install all the required projects, you can use Python and its built-in http.server module to quickly start a simple HTTP server that will make the project index accessible over the network. To do this, run:

python3 -m http.server 8080

This command executes the http.server module on port 8080, and tells the module to expose the contents of the current folder to the network.

To set up a real production environment, ask your IT department for guidelines or to do it for you.

Sysand Client Setup

You should now be able to access the project index through http://localhost:8080. To test it, create a new SysML v2 project in another directory by following the tutorial.

Then, when adding a new usage to the project, use the --index argument to point to your private project index instead of the public sysand.com, for example:

sysand add pkg:sysand/my-publisher/my-project --index http://localhost:8080

An alternative to --index argument is defining the custom index in sysand.toml. See Indexes for details.

GitHub

This part of the guide shows how to run a Sysand index from a private GitHub repository. This allows you to host an index without needing to ask your IT department to set up a server for you, while also allowing simple access control through GitHub’s access management.

Sensmetry has a public GitHub repository implementing this approach. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license and can be freely forked and used in any setting. The repository README contains a detailed explanation of how to set up such a repository and use it.

GitLab

This part of the guide shows how to run a Sysand index from a private GitLab Pages instance. This allows you to host an index without needing to ask your IT department to set up a server for you, while also allowing simple access control through GitLab’s access management.

Sensmetry has a public GitLab repository implementing this approach. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license and can be freely forked and used in any setting. The repository README contains a detailed explanation of how to set up such a repository and use it.