Several users have asked about an option to self-host visualizations on companies’ own servers. This is crucial for projects with restrictive NDAs that prohibit the use of third-party hosting.
We have such self-hosting functionality in a preview mode, if you would like to try it before it is released, let us know and we will enable it for your account.
The self-hosting adds an additional Bundle button to the scene list on a local computer:
The button builds a .zip archive containing all the files needed to load the scene: compressed scene resources, index.html, fonts, CSS and JavaScript files. The archive also contains sample config files for Apache and nginx web servers. The package is fully self-contained, so does not load anything from shapespark.com servers.
Thanks for posting this information. We are definitely going to need to explore this as an option for one of our clients. I would love to test this further. Should I email you or Wojciech about this?
I’ve enabled this option for you. When you launch Shapespark application for the next time you should see the Bundle option in the scene list.
Currently, each new version of the scene that you upload on your own hosting should have a new URL, so that the browser cache does not try using resources from some previous scene version when the viewer is trying to load the new one (from the same URL). The easiest way to do it is to place each new version of the scene in a new directory on the hosting. We are working on a solution to make it easier and to simply allow overwriting old versions by new ones.
Is there any chance to have a kind of “mixed” option in the future?
So the package is hosted on my own server but at the same time it’s able to retrieve some crucial information from Shapespark servers (like core updates etc.)?
The bundle option is no longer in a preview mode - it has been officially released. It is now offered as a part of either the Plus subscription plan or the perpetual license.
@mfarys not really, some of the Shapespark updates change scene format. Editor automatically migrates local scenes to newer formats, we also automatically migrate scenes hosted on Shapespark servers. Self hosted scenes are not migrated automatically, so need to use fixed version of the Javascript engine.
Starting from Shapespark 1.6.2 this is no longer required because the self-hosting bundles now uses versioned resource paths. So, the old version of a scene can be now simply overwritten by a new version.
The Bundle button is no longer in a preview mode, so it is no longer enabled on a per-request basis. Bundling scenes for self-hosting has been officially released: it is offered as a part of either the Plus subscription plan or the perpetual license . So, if you subscribe to the Plus plan or purchase the perpetual license, the Bundle button will automatically appear in the Shapespark user interface.
