Developer Docs

The easiest way to get started with Multinet is to go to https://multinet.app, and begin experimenting.

To build a local development environment, you will need to install dependencies, launch a database, build and run the server, and build and run the client. Follow these steps:

Install Dependencies

These projects are built using the following tools; ensure that you have them installed:

Install and Launch the applications

The most up to date instructions for installing and launching the applications is in the README.md file in each repository. The best order of operations for getting the infrastructure running is to start with the API, then the client, then the visualization apps. To get everything set up:

  1. Clone the repositories for the API, client, and visualization apps.
  2. Follow the instructions in the README.md file in multinet-api to launch the databases and the API server.
  3. Follow the instructions in the README.md file in multinet-client to launch the client.
  4. Follow the instructions in the README.md file in the each of the three visualization apps (MultiLink, MultiMatrix, and UpSet) to launch the visualization apps.

OAuth2 Credentials

Multinet uses Google’s OAuth2 to verify the identity of users accessing the client.

If you’re a developer on the main Multinet project (i.e. the one hosted on multinet.app), you can request our production credentials from an administrator.

Otherwise, to enable OAuth2 on your own project, you’ll have to:

  1. Either have or create a Google Cloud project.
  2. Navigate to the OAuth consent screen section.
  3. Configure your consent screen, and select “Internal” or “External” based on your application requirements (“External” is usually correct if the instance will be public-facing). Multinet requires the “email”, “profile’, and ‘openid’ scopes to run correctly. NOTE: Adding a logo means your app will have to go through verification, which can take 6 weeks.
  4. Now go to the “credential” section, and select “Create Credentials” > “OAuth client ID”.
  5. Set Application type to “Web application” and set a redirect URI. By default, multinet uses <baseurl>/api/user/oauth/google/authorized (note that <baseurl> is usually http://localhost:8000)
  6. Copy the resulting client ID and secret key into your multinet-server .env file as GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET.