First order of business

To begin the second open source course our first order of business is to set up the existing Telescope project locally.

To do this we simply follow the instructions on the github. The documentation highlights how to run several local configurations of Telescope depending on which services you want to enable. I decided to run everything which composes a lot of Docker containers as you can see below.

This is extremely resource intensive (14gb of RAM on my machine at its peak), so much so that when I went to run the init for the database that we attach to the local instance of Telescope it would not properly seed since so much of my computers resources were already in use. Waiting a little while and running the same command worked but for a moment I was confused.

After composing the containers with the default environment set up as per the github documentation you can access Telescope on localhost:8000.

and Traefik Dashboard on 8080

It is also possible to look at the logs for the running containers to see what is going on such as here for the parser that is going through the blogs Telescope should track.

What I learned

I have learned to wait a bit for resources to free up on my machine in certain situations and to try again a few times before jumping to conclusions that things might be broken. I have also taken a brief look at the architecture of Telescope and have learned what Traefik is (it redirects requests to the service that is meant to handle them I think).