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Appliance Studio

Appliance Studio is a lightweight and standalone configuration Graphic User Interface (GUI) for EdgeForge. It runs locally on your machine and allows you to build, save, edit, and manage the two configuration files that are essential to the EdgeForge process, with zero risk of syntax errors.

It also allows you to create presets, which are optional building blocks that you can reuse to create new configuration files.

tech preview
This is a Tech Preview feature and is subject to change. Do not use this feature in production workloads.

Deploy Appliance Studio​

You can deploy Appliance Studio locally either through Docker or Podman. Both AMD64 and ARM64 processor architectures are supported.

Prerequisites​

  • A terminal with Internet access.

Procedure​

  1. Download the docker-compose.yml file to your local machine using the following command.

    wget software.spectrocloud.com/appliance-studio/v4.6.1/docker-compose.yml

  1. (Optional) Modify the persistent data directory. By default, the docker-compose.yml file configures the deploy/appliance-studio-data directory as the persistent data directory. You may change this to point to any other directory by modifying the services.server.volumes field. Create a directory named appliance-studio-data in the same directory as your docker-compose.yml file to match the default configuration.

    Change the path before the : sign to point to the directory you want to mount. You can use an absolute path or a relative path. If you use a relative path, the path is relative to the docker-compose.yml file, not the directory from which you issue the docker compose up command.

    Example
    services:
      server:
        container_name: appliance-studio-server
        ports:
          - "4500:4500"
        networks:
          - appliance-studio-net
        restart: unless-stopped
        volumes:
          # Mount a host directory to /data inside the container for persistent storage.
          # IMPORTANT: Ensure the host directory (e.g., ./appliance-studio-data below) exists locally before running 'docker-compose up'.
          # You can change './appliance-studio-data' to any path on your host machine.
          - ./appliance-studio-data/additional-path:/data

    The data stored in the data directory includes your saved configurations and presets.

  2. If you did not modify the persistent data mount directory, skip this step.

    If you modified the persistent data mount directory, ensure that the directory exists before proceeding to the next step. Create the directory if it does not exist.

  3. Issue the following command to bring up Appliance Studio.

    docker compose up -d

Validate​

  1. Visit port 8443 of your machine to access the Appliance Studio UI. You can do this by opening a web browser and entering the URL of http://localhost:8443.

  2. Confirm that Appliance Studio is accessible.

Next Steps​

Refer to Prepare User Data and Argument Files to learn how to use Appliance Studio to prepare your EdgeForge configuration files.

Issue the following commands to bring down Application Studio once you are done. Your saved presets and configurations will persist when you bring it up again.

docker compose down

Resources​

Appliance Studio can help you prepare the two essential configuration files used during the EdgeForge process. Refer to the following pages for more information on the .arg file and user-data file.