iframe and startup.html

[jwijffels]

Hello,

I'm testing out if inception can be put behind ShinyProxy.
Shinyproxy uses docker containers to manage applications. So I use the inception docker container.
When the container starts up, Shinyproxy wraps the UI of inception in an iframe. In a normal shiny app this looks as follows:

when I put Inception behind Shinyproxy with the config shown below the iframe shows the startup.html from inception but because this is put into an iframe, the page is never refreshed. What's more is that the inception page seems to have been wrapped in a pre tag.

I'm wondering if it would make sense to have an option in inception to remove the startup.html page. ShinyProxy checks every 'heartbeat' number of seconds if the app has come alive and shows a loading screen while it hasn't.
If the inception app would directly go to login screen, I think I can put the app behind ShinyProxy. I've been trying to change the code myself but I'm not a java expert and the maven builds seem to fail after I followed the installation procedure here: https://inception-project.github.io/releases/29.5/docs/developer-guide.html#_setting_up_for_the_development_in_eclipse

proxy:
  title: Inception TEST
  port: 80
  ## Availability: 3 minutes untill the docker container should be up (container-wait-time), timeout after 5 minutes of inactivity (heartbeat-timeout)
  heartbeat-rate: 4000
  heartbeat-timeout: 300000  
  container-wait-time: 180000
  authentication: none
  users:
    - name: jwijffels
      password: abc123
      groups: [ developers, administrators ]
  docker:
    url: http://localhost:2375
    port-range-start: 20000
  container-log-path: ./container-logs
  specs:
    - id: inception
      container-image: ghcr.io/inception-project/inception:29.5            
      port: 18080
      container-volumes: [ "/d/Jan/Dropbox/Work/2023/test/src/inception:/export"]
      hide-navbar-on-main-page-link: false

where the /export folder contains

backup.keep.time=2592000
backup.interval=300
backup.keep.number=10
useSSL=false
allowPublicKeyRetrieval=true
serverTimezone=UTC
server.port=18080
wicket.core.csrf.enabled=false
wicket.core.csrf.no-origin-action=allow
remote-api.enabled=true
annotation.default-preferences.page-size=2000

[reckart]

Can't you disable putting INCEpTION into an IFrame in the first place?

[jwijffels]

That's also what I thought of but that defies the whole purpose of using ShinyProxy.
Shinyproxy puts all other apps which you configure into an iframe. There is no way this is possible within the ShinyProxy framework.

[reckart]

INCEpTION has native OAuth/SAML support since a while. You can migrate your pre-auth setup to a native OAuth/SAML setup.

• https://inception-project.github.io/releases/29.8/docs/admin-guide.html#sect_security_authentication
• https://inception-project.github.io/releases/29.8/docs/admin-guide.html#_manual_intervention_for_external_pre_authentication_users

Your IdP login should provide a uniform access, no?

[jwijffels]

Yes, I could configure my setups with this authentication you list up (or the one which I use currently) as well but that means I will have to configure several authentication elements. Namely

• One for all non-Inception apps running behind Shinyproxy (e.g. I have Shiny apps / Streamlit / Dash / vscode / RStudio / dbgate / pgadmin) and
• One for Inception

I'd would prefer to do that only once. And because shinyproxy put all in an iframe, Inception gets never refreshed.

[reckart]

I believe the problem is that shinyproxy puts the response into a "pre" instead of properly embedding it. The reason for this might be that INCEpTION does not send a proper content-type header when showing this page. Sending this header may also resolve the issue.

[jwijffels]

Is that something I could quickly test myself by changing the startup.html file?

[reckart]

The relevant code is in the class de.tudarmstadt.ukp.inception.app.startup.StartupNoticeValve.

[reckart]

Best open a feature request issue for an option to disable the startup notice.

[reckart]

See #4279

[reckart]

@jwijffels would you like to test it? #4280

[jwijffels]

Many thanks! I'll test it out this Thursday.

[reckart]

@jwijffels I am looking at the ShinyProxy documentation trying to understand how you would use it with INCEpTION. If I understand this correctly, then ShinyProxy creates a new container for each user - that means you basically forfeit all multi-user capabilities of INCEpTION and essentially run it like a single-user application, right?

[jwijffels]

The idea there is that you have a running mariadb containing all the data and a shinyproxy instance which starts up an inception instance (1 docker container) which connects to the database.
That is one instance for each user is started up indeed.

[reckart]

INCEpTION maintains only part of the data in the MariaDB. The annotations, search index, knowledge-base and more are maintained on the file system. Also INCEpTION maintains session information and other internal state that is not sharable between different instances. Connecting multiple INCEpTION instances to the same MariaDB database (not instance) and sharing a data volume between different INCEpTION instances is not supported.

[jwijffels]

Right. Good that you mention this.
That leaves then only the option to use shinyproxy in front of an existing running Inception instance.