Objective

The Dashboard UI provides the ability to extend its interface by adding your own custom modules. Custom modules are located under the Operate pillar and provide new modules to operate on the product that you are building on top of SOAJS. Once you have new updates for your custom modules, you can use the SOAJS Dashboard to pull these updates and restart the Dashboard Nginx.

Steps

UI modules are part of the virtual host code that the nginx creates therefore to update them, we need to update the nginx in Dashboard:

1. Go to Deploy pillar → High Availability
2. Click on Nginx Tab
3. Lookup the nginx entry
   1. Open the Service Operations menu
   2. Click Redeploy Service

Redeploy Service

This operation will redeploy your service using the exact same settings that were used to deploy it in the first place.

The SOAJS deployer inside the SOAJS image will run and clone the SOAJS Dashboard UI Modules, if there are changes then they will be pulled then it will check if you have any Custom UI modules if you have provided them in the recipe and pulls them as well.

Then it will build the upstream configuration to point to the SOAJS Controller and create the virtual host entry for the Dashboard UI widget and start the nginx server.

While the deployer is running, your old nginx remains operational until the new one is flagged as running by either Docker Swarm or Kubernetes depending on which of the two drivers you have chosen.

When the new nginx becomes ready, then the old one will be terminated; your Nginx is now updated and contains the new custom UI Modules updates.