adding info to readme (#8)

Author: amitschang

README.md

@@ -1,2 +1,79 @@
 # opensciserver
-OpenSciServer single repo
+
+This repo will contain all sciserver components such that they can be built and
+vended as a single-versioned unit. This repo is currently incomplete.
+
+## Installation
+
+Prerequisites:
+* A kubernetes cluster with an ingress controller
+* helm installed
+* This repository checked out (until we can vend the built helm charts to an
+  appropriate stable web location)
+
+Mainline commits, pull-requests and tagged versions have built artifacts
+available on the github container registry with tags matching the version. to
+install we need to build the helm chart reference the appropriate repo location
+and version of built images:
+
+```sh
+# within this repo
+make helm REPO=ghcr.io/sciserver/opensciserver VTAG=main
+```
+
+The above will build the helm chart where images are located in the official
+github container registry for opensciserver and we want those built from the
+latest commit to main. This will place the zipped chart under
+`helm/build/sciserver-{VTAG}.tar.gz`, which can be directly specified to helm as
+the chart source (see below). To reference a pull request, simply replace `VTAG`
+as appropriate (`pr-` plus the pull request number):
+
+```sh
+make helm REPO=ghcr.io/sciserver/opensciserver VTAG=pr-6
+```
+
+Once the charts are built, we can install using helm. For a development
+installation with no pre-existing requirements and no persistent data, we can
+use options as below:
+
+```sh
+helm -n sciserver \
+  upgrade --install \
+  --set prefix={name} \
+  --set baseDomain={domain-name} \
+  --set logging.api.image.tag=x --set backup.enable=false \
+  --set web.replicaCount=0 --set graphql.replicaCount=0 \
+  --set rendersvc.replicaCount=0 --set logging.api.replicaCount=0 \
+  --set proxy.cidrWhiteList=0.0.0.0/0 \
+  --set dev.nopvc=true \
+  -f helm/sciserver/password-manifest.yaml \
+  {name} helm/build/sciserver-main.tar.gz \
+```
+
+Some options above (such as the logging api image tag and the 0 replica count
+specs) are there due to incompleteness of this repo, or needs fixing.
+
+## Building
+
+We coordinate the multi-component builds with a make file at root, which
+contains commands for building individual components and the system as a whole.
+The github ci action demonstrates what is needed to make a complete build and
+upload artifacts, briefly:
+
+```sh
+# make the java components
+make java
+
+# make all images and their dependencies. The default naming scheme is
+# sciserver/component:version where the version is related to the git commit at
+# HEAD.
+make images
+# explicitly set a tag
+make images VTAG={tag}
+
+# make documentation
+make docs
+```
+
+And so on.
+