Apps
Apps
A RocketRide app is a user interface that runs inside the RocketRide shell against your engine. The shell provides sign-in, the engine connection, the workspace, and settings; the app brings the screens and the pipelines behind them. Apps run in the browser or in a VS Code webview; the pipelines they start always run on the server.
Why apps
To a user, an app turns a pipeline's work into a tool a teammate opens, not a script someone has to run themselves.
To RocketRide, the same engine, node catalog, and deploy path serve both pipelines and the interfaces built on top of them, and the catalog of apps is how that work is shared inside an organization.
Apps and pipelines
A pipeline can belong to an app, or stand beside it. The difference decides who runs it and when.
Bundled with the app. The .pipe file lives in the app folder and ships with the app. The app starts it when it needs it, for example when the user runs a query, and every signed-in user gets their own instance, automatically. A bundled pipeline is never shared between users and cannot run on a schedule, and it stops by itself after approximately ttl seconds without a pipeline data request or a pipeline activity event (apaevt_*; 15 minutes by default, 0 disables the timeout). Status polling and raw stdout/debugger events do not keep it alive.
Deployed on its own. The pipeline is its own project, deployed
separately from the app. One instance serves everyone on the team it is
published to, and it can run on a schedule. A scheduled run can have a
ttl timeout counted from its last pipeline data request; emitted events
do not reset it. The run can also finish or be stopped before that timeout.
An omitted or zero ttl disables the timeout. A run started by hand ignores
the schedule's timeout and runs until it finishes or someone stops it.
The app refers to the pipeline by identity and attaches to whatever is
running; it does not start it.
A .pipe file outside the app folder is not deployed with the app. If the
app needs it, deploy it separately.
Secrets never ship in either case: pipeline configs carry
${ROCKETRIDE_*} placeholders that the server fills from the signed-in
user's stored keys.
Next steps
- App Builder: build, preview, and deploy an app.
- Pipelines: what the app is running.
- Shell API: the hooks and descriptor, when you code by hand.