LitePolis

Infrastructure for E-democracy

Overview

LitePolis is an advanced, Python-based infrastructure designed for building customizable opinion collection systems, extending beyond the capabilities of the original Polis. It offers a developer-friendly environment focused on flexibility and power.

Built with a modular, microservice-like architecture, LitePolis is distributed by default, leveraging the Ray framework for inherent auto-scaling capabilities right out of the box. This ensures your applications can handle large groups and high traffic volumes efficiently.

The core of LitePolis is a central package manager that discovers and orchestrates various components – API Routers, Middleware, and UI Packages. This modularity allows developers and data scientists to easily build, deploy, and iterate on sophisticated data-driven e-democracy tools and other opinion-gathering applications.

Quick start

1. Install the LitePolis CLI

The litepolis-cli is your main tool for creating, managing, and deploying LitePolis packages.

• Needs Python (3.12 recommended) and pip installed.

pip install litepolis

2. Explore Packages for Deployment

3. Deploy

Add features you want in LitePolis

litepolis-cli deploy list-deps

# remove packages if you don't need default packages that provides Polis functionality
litepolis-cli deploy remove-deps litepolis-router-default

# add packages that you need
litepolis-cli deploy add-deps litepolis-router-example

# setup default config for packages in `~/.litepolis/config.conf`
litepolis-cli deploy init-config

# setup password etc.
nano ~/.litepolis/config.conf

# start serving
litepolis-cli deploy serve
# Or: start a local head node and serve in one go
litepolis-cli deploy local

# Or deploy to remote cluster
litepolis-cli deploy --cluster ray://<head-node-ip>:10001 serve

For Developers

To build new package for the LitePolis ecosystem

# Create a new router package
litepolis-cli create router litepolis-router-myrouter

# Create a new database adapter
litepolis-cli create database litepolis-database-mydb

# Create a new middleware package
litepolis-cli create middleware litepolis-middleware-mymiddleware

# Create a new UI component
litepolis-cli create ui litepolis-ui-mypanel

Each command clones the appropriate template repo, renames everything to match your package name, and re-initializes git so you can push to your own repo.

After scaffolding:

cd litepolis-router-myrouter
git remote add origin YOUR_REPO_URL
git push -u origin main

Package requirements

Each package must expose at module level:

• router — a FastAPI APIRouter instance
• prefix — the API path prefix string (e.g. "v3")
• dependencies — list of FastAPI dependencies (can be [])
• DEFAULT_CONFIG — a dict[str, str] of default config values (used by init-config)

For database, middleware, and UI packages, the scaffolded template will show the expected interface.

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CLI Reference

litepolis-cli deploy [OPTIONS] COMMAND

Options:
  --packages-file PATH   Path to packages.txt  [default: ~/.litepolis/packages.txt]
  --cluster TEXT         Ray cluster address   [default: auto]

Commands:
  add-deps      Add or update a package in packages.txt and install it
  remove-deps   Remove a package from packages.txt
  list-deps     Compare packages.txt with currently installed versions
  sync-deps     Install all packages in packages.txt to their pinned versions
  init-config   Generate ~/.litepolis/config.conf from installed packages
  serve         Start the LitePolis API server
  local         Start a local Ray head node and serve

litepolis-cli create COMMAND

Commands:
  router        Scaffold a new router package
  database      Scaffold a new database package
  middleware    Scaffold a new middleware package
  ui            Scaffold a new UI package

Next Steps:

• Use StarRocks as database [WIP#todo]
• Deploy to Google cloud with autoscale [WIP#todo]