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The App Lifecycle

Portal starts and stops installed apps on demand and lets you configure this behaviour.

Installation and Creation

When a user installs your app, the image is pulled and the containers are created. However, the app is not started yet. Basically, the following command is executed.

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docker-compose up --no-start

Start

The Portal's reverse proxy forwards all http traffic to your app and takes care of authentication and other concerns. This is described in detail under Routing and Access Control. One of its tasks is to inform the Portal core of incoming traffic to an app such that the app can be started if it is not running.

During the time it takes for the app to start, a splash screen is displayed and regularly refreshed. This splash screen is provided by the Portal core and as an app developer, you do not have to do anything to make it work.

Stop

After some idle time - i.e. a time period without http traffic to an app - the Portal core stops the app. The container is only stopped, but not removed. Essentially, the docker-compose stop command is issued.

Configuration

You may configure your apps lifecycle behaviour via the lifecycle section inside the app_meta.json. For example:

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  "lifecycle": {
    "always_on": false,
    "idle_time_for_shutdown": 60
  },

You may set always_on to true causing your app to never be stopped. In this case, providing an idle_time_for_shutdown is forbidden.

Or you may set an idle_time_for_shutdown in seconds. The default is 60. In this case, always_on must not be set or set to false.