Deploy the GUI in web mode

The Launching the GUI section showed how you can launch the GUI on a local workstation.

To recap, you can launch the GUI in web mode by running:

sigui --mode=web /path/for/my/sorting_analyzer

which will start a server on your localhost:

Launching server at http://localhost:43957

However, the GUI can also be deployed on a remote server, and accessed through a web browser or directly in the cloud, thanks to its web mode.

Deploying on a remote lab server

If you want to deploy the GUI on a remote lab server, the GUI can be used by multiple users with VPN access to the server.

To setup the web GUI on a remote server, follow these steps:

  1. Choose a server machine in your lab network (e.g. “my-lab-server”) that is accessible through VPN by all lab members.

  2. Install spikeinterface-gui and its dependencies on the server machine.

  3. Launch the GUI launcher on the server machine with the following command:

sigui --mode=web --address=auto-ip

If all your analyzers will be in the same root folder (or in subfolders), you can also specify the --root-folder option:

sigui --mode=web --address=auto-ip --root-folder=/path/to/my/analyzers

  1. The server will start and display the IP address to access the GUI launcher, e.g.:

Launching server at http://SERVER.IP.ADDRESS:43957/launcher

  1. Share the displayed IP address with all lab members, so they can connect to the GUI launcher from their local machines.

Deploying on cloud platforms

The spikeinterface-gui web mode can also be deployed on cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

This type of deployment is recommended if all your raw and sorted data are already stored in the cloud.

You will need a simple wrapper python script that Panel can serve.

For example, create a file named si_launcher.py with the following content:

from spikeinterface_gui.launcher import Launcher

launcher = Launcher(backend="panel")
launcher.layout.servable()

Then, you need a Dockerfile which installs the GUI and serves the panel app as entry point. Here is a minimal example of a Dockerfile:

FROM python:3.9-slim

RUN pip install spikeinterface-gui[web]

COPY si_launcher.py /si_launcher.py

EXPOSE 8000

ENTRYPOINT ["sh", "-c", "panel serve /si_launcher.py --address 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 --allow-websocket-origin ${ALLOW_WEBSOCKET_ORIGIN} --keep-alive 10000 --warm"]

You can then build and run the Docker image on your cloud platform of choice, making sure to set the ALLOW_WEBSOCKET_ORIGIN environment variable to the domain name or IP address of your server.

Note that you can also customize the launcher script to pre-load specific sorting analyzers or set a root folder.