agama/rust/agama-tui

Agama TUI

This package corresponds to the Hack Week 25 project Build a terminal user-interface (TUI) for Agama.

To be clear, it is just an experiment and providing a TUI is not in Agama's roadmap at this time.

Description

Officially, Agama offers two different user interfaces. On the one hand, we have the web-based interface, which is the one you see when you run the installation media. On the other hand, we have a command-line interface. In both cases, you can use them using a remote system, either using a browser or the agama CLI.

We would expect most of the cases to be covered by this approach. However, if you cannot use the web-based interface and, for some reason, you cannot access the system through the network, your only option is to use the CLI. This interface offers a mechanism to modify Agama's configuration using an editor (vim, by default), but perhaps you might want to have a more user-friendly way.

Goals

The main goal of this project is to build a minimal terminal user-interface for Agama. This interface will allow the user to install the system providing just a few settings (selecting a product, a storage device and a user password). Then it should report the installation progress.

Daily progress

Day 1

• Get familiar with Ratatui.
• Implement a basic UI that displays the list of products and the selected one.
• The UI is updated on server changes (SystemChanged and ConfigChanged by now).

Day 2

• Simplify the interaction with the API.
• Extract product selection logic to a separate widget.

Day 3

• Make it possible to run API actions in background.
• Add a pop-up when the API is busy.
• Refactor the code to split the state and the widgets, getting inspiration from The Elm Architecture.

Day 4

• The current architecture has a problem: the render methods are responsible for extracting the information from the API which is available behind a Mutex in the widget's state.
• We change the approach and now the widget state is responsible for extracting the information needed by the view. No more locks in the render function.
• Introduce a new storage page with different sections that you can navigate using Tab.

Day 5

• Add a network page.
• Add a progress widget.
• Properly update the UI when the backend changes (it got broken at some point).

Testing

The code is based on the api-v2 of the Agama project. You can run that code using the testing_using_container.sh script.

[!NOTE] When running the container, you need to manually start the storage service.

podman exec --tty --interactive agama agamactl storage

Alternatively, you can use the api-v2 ISO. Beware that the web UI is not working in this case.

Once you start Agama, you can connect using the TUI (although you need to authenticate first):

cargo run --bin agama -- --host https://localhost:10443/ --insecure auth login
cargo run --bin agama-tui -- --host https://localhost:10443/ --insecure

If you are not using a container, replace the https://localhost:10443/ with the URL of your Agama instance.