Building Aeon

AEON lives in two Github repositories and is available under a permissive MIT license. First repository manages the web frontend, and the second one is responsible for the compute engine.

Deploying the web frontend

If you want to run your own version of the AEON frontend, you simply need to download the latest source files from the aeon-client repository (or download the sources for a particular release based on its tag). Then, you can either open the index.html file in your favourite browser, or deploy the whole directory to any webserver that is able to serve static content.

Compiling the compute engine

To run your own version of the compute engine, you need to download the source files from the aeon-server repository (again, you can either download the latest version from the master branch, or sources for a specific version based on its tag). To run or compile the compute engine, you will need the Rust nightly compiler. We recommend following the installation instructions on rust-lang.org. These will install the whole distribution into your local ~/.cargo folder, hence they do not require any elevated privileges (as opposed to some OS package managers).

Once you have completed the setup process, you need to switch from stable to the nightly compiler by executing:

rustup default nightly

Once you have the compiler ready, you can navigate to the source files you downloaded from Github, and execute

cargo run --release

to immediately compile and start the compute engine. Alternatively, you can also run

cargo build --release

which will generate the compute engine binary in ./target/release/biodivine-aeon-server.

Building this manual

This manual is available in the aeon-server repository in the manual directory, and is managed using the mdBook tool. You can follow the instructions on their website to install mdbook. Once you have mdbook ready, you simply need to navigate to the manual folder and run mdbook build to write the output files into the book directory (from here, you can deploy them as a static website). Alternatively, you can run mdbook serve to open a local webserver at http://localhost:3000 which serves the manual from your machine and automatically updates when you change its contents.