dylan-playground

Implementation of play.opendylan.org which lets users try out Dylan code in a web browser.

Installation

• Install Open Dylan 2023.1 so it has a reasonably up-to-date dylan binary.
• git clone https://github.com/dylan-lang/dylan-playground
• cd dylan-playground
• dylan update
• dylan build --all

Deployment on Debian

(These instructions were tested on Debian 12.)

By default the playground is deployed to /opt/dylan-playground/{dev,live} and it expects /opt/opendylan/bin/dylan-compiler to exist. To change either of those you must edit the Makefile.

1. Stop the current dylan-playground process so the executable file can be replaced. Usually just systemctl stop dylan-playground.

2. make install to install the "dev" instance. To install the "live" instance, use environment=live make install.

3. The first time you deploy you'll need to configure systemd. As root, run these commands:

   cp dylan-playground.service /etc/systemd/system/
   systemctl start dylan-playground
   systemctl status dylan-playground  # and/or check journalctl output
   systemctl enable dylan-playground  # enable starting after boot

4. NOTE that if you change the deployment directory you must move the "shares" subdirectory to the new location or shared playground links will break.

5. Arrange for the "shares" directory to get backed up periodically since if this is missing all shared playground URLs everywhere since the beginning of time will be broken.

HTTPS

Dylan's ssl-network has bit rotted so in the interest of speed I just put the playground behind an nginx proxy. Here are some reminders about how I set it up.

(These instructions were tested on Debian 12.)

• sudo apt install certbot nginx

• If you just installed nginx it should have started automatically. If not, then sudo systemctl start nginx. It must listen on port 80 for the cert challenge.

• Use certbot to install a Let's Encrypt cert and key:

  $ sudo certbot certonly --nginx

  The cert should be renewed automatically due to a systemctl timer. See systemctl list-timers. To renew the certificate manually, stop the playground web server and run certbot renew --standalone and restart nginx with systemctl restart nginx.

• Create new nginx config and restart nginx:

  listen 443 ssl;
  listen [::]:443 ssl;
  server_name play.opendylan.org;
  ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/play.opendylan.org/cert.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/play.opendylan.org/privkey.pem;
  limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=playground:1m rate=30r/m;
  location / {
    limit_req zone=playground burst=10;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:80;  # dylan-playground server
  }
  

• Replace default with the play.opendylan.org config in sites-enabled and restart with nginx -s reload.