Lightweight dashboards and reports with Irydium and surge.sh

One of my main goals with Irydium is to allow it to be a part of as many data science and engineering workflows as possible (including ones I haven’t thought of). Yes, like Iodide and other products, I am (slowly) building a web-based interface for building and sharing dashboards, reports, and similar things. However, I also want to fully support local and command-line based workflows. Beyond the obvious utility of being able to use your favorite text-editor to create documents, this also opens up the possibility of combining Irydium with other tools and workflows. For a slightly longer exposition on why this is desirable, I would highly recommend reading Ryan Harter’s post on the subject: Don’t make me code in your text box.

Using the irydium template

To make getting started easier, I just created an irydium-template: a simple GitHub repository which contains a minimal markdown document (a big mac index visualization) which you can use as a base, as well as a bit of npm scaffolding to get you up and running quickly. To check it out via the console, I recommend using degit (the tool of choice for such things in the Svelte community):

npx degit git@github.com:irydium/irydium-template.git my-notebook
npm install
npm run dev

This will create a webserver which renders the document (index.md) at port 3000, along with some debugging options. As you edit and save the document, the site should update automatically.

Publishing your work

When you’re happy with the results, you can create a static version of the site (an index.html file) by running npm run build. You can publish this via whatever you like: GitHub pages, Netlify / Vercel or… my new favorite service, surge.sh. Surge provides a really simple hosting service for hosting static sites and works great with Irydium. Installing and running it locally is two commands:

npm install -g surge
surge

Surge will prompt you for an email and a password, then will automatically publish your site at a unique URL. As an example, I published a site for the above template: few-blade.surge.sh

Interested in chatting more about this? Feel free to reach out on the Irydium Gitter chat.