alice-catalogserver not working because of missing participants.json

[mcordsmeier]

Hi!

I have played around with the MXD's alice-catalogserver. I needed to make some changes (see below for changed soure code) to get it running. After the evaluation I have some questions:

Questions

1. All controlplanes have an integrated federated catalogserver on port 8085. What is the difference between the separate alice-catalogserver and the catalogserver of the alice-controlplane?
2. It looks like every controllplane is crawling all other controlplanes every minute. To have a crawler inside each participant's controlplane requires lot of connections in a real world scenario?
3. alice-catalogserver only publishes the port for the management API. Why not the catalog query API (context fc)
4. Why is the alice-cs dsp API ("url": "http://alice-cs:8082/api/dsp") instead of the alice-controlplane dsp API ("url": "http://alice-controlplane:8084/api/v1/dsp) configured in participants.json

Issue
I found error messages in the alice-catalogserver pods logfile because no participants.json is included in the container. The crawler is not working because there are no work items,

Proposed changes
I added the following lines to mxd/modules/catalog-server.tf to mount the participants.json file from the assets directory to the containers /app directory

          volume_mount {
            mount_path = "/app/participants.json"
            sub_path   = "participants.json"
            name       = "participants-volume"
          }
        }

        volume {
          name = "registry-volume"
          config_map {
            name = kubernetes_config_map.catalog-server-config.metadata[0].name
          }
        }

resource "kubernetes_config_map" "participants-map" {
  metadata {
    name = "participants-map"
    namespace = var.namespace
  }
  data = {
    "participants.json" = file("./assets/participants.json")
  }
}

Added the following lines to enable the crawler and to configure the path to the node list file,

    TX_EDC_CATALOG_NODE_LIST_FILE   = "/app/participants.json"
    EDC_CATALOG_CACHE_EXECUTION_ENALED = true

The crawler is working with the proposed changes.