Spotfire CDK: Updating Web Player modules

The Spotfire Web Player when deployed using the Cloud Deployment Kit does not load it's packages from a deployment area. 

Instead any additional packages that are required must be loaded from a custom persistent volume. 

Instructions on how to do this are documented here

If the web players modules need to be updated, the following process should be followed. 

Note: These instructions do not apply if a standard client hotfix is to be applied. In those circumstances, the underlying container image needs to be rebuilt and the web player helm chart needs to be redeployed. 

See here for documentation on this topic.

The following steps assume the web player is already using a custom deployment  which simply needs to be updated. 

1. Scale the web player deployment to zero replicas

  kubectl scale deployment spotfire-webplayer --replicas=0

2. It may additionally be required to empty the volume containing the unpacked modules as the Kubernetes job will unpack them once more. E.g if using local storage for the custom web player modules, empty the directory first. 

This step could be skipped if for example, all that's required is to add an additional module. The web player pod will mount this volume and use whichever modules are found. 
 

  rm -f /volumes/webplayer-modules/*

3. Update the local custom-modules directory (see the article referenced above)

4. Recreate the docker image. This will copy the updated modules back to the docker image 

  docker build -t webplayer-custom-modules .

5. Push the image to the registry

  docker push ${CONTAINER_REGISTRY}/webplayer-custom-modules

6. Run the Kubernetes job to repopulate the volume with the unpacked modules

  kubectl apply -f unpack-modules-to-pvc.yaml

7. The job job/populate-modules-job will run and complete. Once this is finished check the PVC associated with the custom modules and ensure that the correct modules are there
 

ls -l /volumes/webplayer-packages/
total 76
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'ChemDraw Chemistry for Linux_4.12.0.37'
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'CleanupTransformationExample for Linux_4.12.0.37'
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'Glysade Python MAB for Linux_4.12.0.37'
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'Glysade Python for Linux_4.12.0.37'
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'Lead Discovery Biologics for Linux_4.12.0.37'
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'Lead Discovery ChemCharts for Linux_4.12.0.37'
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  2 11:54 'Lead Discovery Knime Connector for Linux_4.12.0.37'

8. Scale the web player deployment back to 1 replica
 

kubectl scale deployment spotfire-webplayer --replicas=1

9. Once the web player containers have recreated, check under Monitoring and Diagnostics -> Instances -> (Modules)

The updated modules can be inspected to ensure they are as expected.