New dependencies

Blast and all its associated services are run in Docker containers. This allows the application to be portable. You may be working on some code that requires you to add a new Python package. To add this dependency, you have to do two things.

1. Add the package and version to the app/requirements.txt. This allows Docker to pip install your new package.

2. Change the BLAST_IMAGE variable in your env/.env.dev to be blast_base instead of blast_latest. This will force Docker to build and install your package.

Note

Setting BLAST_IMAGE=blast_latest in your env/env.dev means the latest Blast Docker image is downloaded and used when running Blast locally. This is faster than building the image from scratch every time. BLAST_IMAGE=blast_base forces the image to be built from scratch which is required when you have added a new dependency. Eventually, when a new dependency is accepted into the main branch it will become part of the Blast latest image.