Creating Static Dashboards with Protosaur

protosaur.dev allows data practitioners at Mozilla to create prototype static dashboards behind Mozilla SSO (single-sign-on). As the name implies, protosaur is intended for prototypes -- dashboards created using this system are not monitored or supported by Data Operations or Data Engineering. Protosaur is a simple static hosting service: it does not provide form handling, databases, or any other kind of server-side operation. However, for presenting dashboards and other types of data visualization, a static website is often all you need (see, for example, the galaxy of sites produced using GitHub Pages).

Protosaur's architecture is simple: it serves files in a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket under the protosaur.dev domain. How you get the files into the bucket is entirely up to you: you can use CircleCI, Airflow, or any other method that you might choose.

The current procedure for creating a new protosaur dashboard is as follows:

• Find a GCP project to use for the GCS bucket. This could be a team project (if you have one already) or a GCP prototype project. Using a prototype project is preferred for larger efforts with multiple components in addition to a front-end dashboard.
• Create a GCS bucket in said project.
• Upload content into the bucket (e.g. via gsutil).
• Add the project to Protosaur's configuration, which currently lives in the protodash repository on GitHub. For up to date instructions on how to do this, see the project's README.