Configure the python package to include the UI

Is your feature request related to a specific problem?

Right now, the python package fidesctl does not include the admin-ui. Instead, we include it via docker.

Describe the solution you’d like

We should instead include the static build assets with the python package so that when we run fidesctl webserver everything will work, even without docker.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered, if any

Keeping everything done via docker

Additional context

This will help us get the admin-ui running in fidesctl+ as well https://ethyca.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PM/pages/2392260631/Hosting+the+datamap+UI+along+with+fidesctl+UI

I think this will also remove the need for these lines in the Dockerfile (or we’ll need to update them) https://github.com/ethyca/fides/blob/main/Dockerfile#L6-L18

[sanders41]

Without having tested it I think the setup.py route could work as long as the person building it has node/npm. Maybe that is ok since the build and release will be done from a GitHub action. Could be confusing for a developer that wants to work with the code since something like pip install -e . would also require node/npm. A note in the contributing guide could be used to explain that.

[allisonking]

Oh, and one thing to watch out for here that @PSalant726 and I found is the files will only included with the pip install if they are in the src/fidesctl directory.

We did something similar to this and found that even though the files were included in the build if they are outside that directory, they don’t get included when doing the pip install.

Oh dang, thanks for the tip, that’s great to know!

This looks like a useful resource that I’ll probably be basing my approach on: http://markneumann.xyz/blog/packaging_uis_in_python/

It doesn’t really have a step that automates the frontend build, though. However, Sebastian found that jupyterlab does something like what we want! Here’s its setup.py which looks like it calls npm directly 🤯

If it can be built directly in setup.py, that might work? Otherwise I think we may need to add some steps in both the github workflow that publishes the package, and also the dockerfile.