Online interpreter for Lala - the Linear Algebra Language

Set up your environment using the following steps:

1. Rust
2. A MongoDB server
3. A Redis storage instance
4. A Firebase Authentication Project

1. Install Rust. Use this guide to get started.
   • Note: it is a lot easier to install Rust on a Mac or Linux machine.
2. Install wasm-pack. Use this site for help.
   • I prefer to simlpy type cargo install wasm-pack once Rust and Cargo (the package manager for Rust) have been set up in the previous step.

Rust is a compiled language, so we're going to have to build our interpreter. This is probably the trickiest part of the set-up, because we have to build it twice: once to compile it to wasm to interpret our Lala code directly on the frontend, and a second time to set up the SocketIO server to enable our Lala Notebooks. Let's get started.

If you are in the root directory of this project (lala-online/), you can enter the directory that houses Lala by typing cd lala. PLEASE do the following steps in this order.

First we're going to compile the interpreter to wasm. Open the Cargo.toml file. You can think of this as a package.json file for Rust projects. We need to remove every dependency starting with "socketioxide". To help you, I have provided a dependency section with these dependencies removed. Here it is:

[dependencies]
anyhow = "1.0.80"
pest = "2.7.7"
pest_derive = "2.7.7"
wasm-bindgen = "0.2.91"

Please replace the current dependency section with this one. We cannot compile to wasm with those dependencies, but we will need them later. Save the file. Go back to the root directory of this project: cd ..

I have provided a bash script that compiles the interpreter to wasm and copies the result to the client/ directory for the frontend to use. Please now run ./build_lala.sh. If you do not permission to execute the script, run chmod 744 build_lala.sh.

Once that finishes, go back into the lala directory: cd lala. We are going to add the dependencies back into the Cargo.toml file. Again, I have provided the correct dependency list:

[dependencies]
anyhow = "1.0.80"
pest = "2.7.7"
pest_derive = "2.7.7"
wasm-bindgen = "0.2.91"
socketioxide = "0.8"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
tracing = "0.1"
tracing-subscriber = "0.3"
axum = "0.6"
serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }
serde_json = "1.0"
tower-http = { version = "0.4", features = ["cors"] }
tower = "0.4"

Just replace the older, shorter dependency list with this one.

Now, we are going to build our socketio Rust server for the Lala notebooks. Simply run cargo build --release.

If you are interested in why we couldn't just build the socketio server first and then compile the interpreter to wasm, I will briefly explain. If we first compile the server, then remove dependencies from the Cargo.toml file, then compile to wasm, and then run our application, Rust will notice that Cargo.toml has been changed after the last build was compiled and attempt to recompile. Without the dependencies, we cannot build the socketio server.

Cool! We are done building both of our Lala interpreters.

1. This part is pretty simple. Install MongoDB using the official guide.
   • I am on version 4.4.4

1. Also pretty simple. Install Redis using the official guide.
   • I am on Redis server version 7.0.14. I am not using Redis-stack (it is not supported on my Linux distro).

1. Create a Firebase Authentication project in the Firebase console.
2. Go to the "Settings" page of the Firebase project. Click "Service Accounts" and then "Generate New Private Key". Download this key (it's just a .json file and note where it is saved. Try making sure it is saved to the server directory of this project, just to make the next step easier.
3. We need to create two .env files: one in the client directory and one in the server directory.

The server .env file is simple. It just contains the following value:

So my .env file in my server directory looks like this:

GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS="./lala-firebase-key.json"

Now for the client .env file.

The first seven values come from Firebase. On the "Settings" page, scroll down and look at the code block. They can be copied and pasted into this .env file in the exact order they appear.

The second to last value, VITE_APP_BACKEND, will be provided by me: "http://127.0.0.1:4000/api/". Please insert this into the .env file and please don't change it. If you must change it, go to server/src/server.js and change the port on line 75 and use that port here.

The last value, "VITE_KERNEL_ENDPOINT" will be provided by me: "http://127.0.0.1:8080". Please use this one as the socketio server hosts itself on port 8080. If anything on your computer is running on port 8080, try killing it. If you can't, go to line 113 of lala/src/main.rs and change the address to whatever local port you want. Keep the ampersand ("&") in the front. So the line would be: axum::Server::bind(&"127.0.0.1:<YOUR_PORT_HERE>".parse().unwrap()). Rebuild the socketio server using the steps above. If you have any trouble with this, do not hesitate to reach out to me for help.

Almost done. Let's set up our Javascript dependencies Run these commands:

npm i -g concurrently cd server npm i cd ../client npm i cd ..

npm run flush this will flush the redis cache on your machine npm run seed this will seed the database for our test user

npm start

You'll see a lot of output on your screen; that's because we've launched our mongo server, react client, and lala socketio server all at once.

To get started using Lala Online, consult the Guide page once you sign in!

If you like, you can signin using the Test User credentials provided in a Markdown file called TestUserCreds.txt.