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Pixelated Dispatcher

The Pixelated Dispatcher is used to host Pixelated for more than one user. It allows you to run, manage and restrict access (using a login form) to different instances of the pixelated-user-agent.

By default, the Pixelated Dispatcher will connect to our test provider, try.pixelated-project.org. In order to run your own provider, see pixelated-platform.

The Pixelated is still in early development state!

Getting started

This repository contains a Vagrantfile that helps set up a running pixelated-dispatcher installation within a virtual machine. Just install vagrant and a Vagrant provider (such as VirtualBox), fork/clone this repository and, in the project's root folder, run:

vagrant up

After all the dependencies are downloaded and the service is running, you can access the login page at https://localhost:8080/. By default, the dispatcher will connect to our test provider at try.pixelated-project.org.

Now that the service is running, you can login to the virtual machine with vagrant ssh and run our suite of automated tests:

cd /vagrant
python setup.py test

Debian packages

We have Debian packages available in our repositories. Use these commands to install them:

apt-key adv --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 0x287A1542472DC0E3
apt-key adv --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 0x1E34A1828E207901

echo "deb http://debian.mirror.iphh.net/debian wheezy-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
echo "deb http://packages.pixelated-project.org/debian wheezy-snapshots main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pixelated.list
echo "deb http://packages.pixelated-project.org/debian wheezy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pixelated.list
echo "deb http://deb.leap.se/0.6 wheezy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/leap.list

apt-get update
apt-get install -t wheezy-backports pixelated-dispatcher

Command line interface (CLI)

The pixelated dispatcher has a command line interface that can be used to monitor and manage the user agent instances. To see everything the pixelated-dispatcher command can do, run:

pixelated-dispatcher --help

OBS 1: If you're running the Vagrant box, the pixelated-dispatcher won't be automatically added to your PATH, so it must be ran as python pixelated/pixelated-dispatcher.py from inside the /vagrant folder).

OBS 2: The CLI interface by default won't work if an invalid certificate is being used on the dispatcher. To bypass this, use the -k / --no-check-certificate parameter.

Architecture Overview

The pixelated-dispatcher is a combination of two daemons: the pixelated-dispatcher proxy and the pixelated-dispatcher manager.

The proxy is the user facing part and the service you access when connecting to https://localhost:8080/. It handles authentication and acts as a proxy for the agents. The intention is for this daemon to give up on all unnecessary privileges as soon as possible.

The manager is responsible for managing the lifecycle of the user agent instances. It is not accessible from the web, but provides a REST-ful API to create/start/stop/delete agents. It uses docker to isolate the user-agent's processes from each other and to provide the necessary runtime environment.

Both the proxy and the manager need to be running for the pixelated-dispatcher to work correctly.