Research alternative ways to configure the frontend application

[lunkwill42]

The frontend application configuration is defined in config.tsx - and the values are provided as environment variables at build time.

If we have a goal to provide a Docker image with the Argus frontend in it, this still needs to build everything from scratch at deployment time, since all the configuration is statically compiled into the resulting JavaScript files. This makes every deployment situation "fat" and time-consuming.

I think it's desirable for frontend deployments to be as lightweight as possible. Can we find ways to generate a static file with JavaScript or JSON-based configuration from the run-time environment, without involving the entire npm build framework, and have the React application load this file at runtime?

Surely this situation is not unique in the world - so it's likely someone else has made useful solutions we can learn fro.

[podliashanyk]

[WIP]

This comment contains consolidated info after the research and is not yet finished.

Config file changes:

• dotenv option
• js/json option
• /public folder option

Docker build optimization:

• Speeding up npm install in docker npm/npm#8836
• .dockeringnore file

Consider tools:

• https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html

[lunkwill42]

* dotenv option

I would assume dotenv isn't much different from today's solution: It grabs variables from the environment as npm runs - this environment isn't available when the resulting JS code runs in the browser.