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Setup

In this setup we will walk-through the requirements to get the SAS Portal up and running for you.

The guide requires someone that can provide a web-server and someone with the assumable SAS Administrator role.

A walkthrough of the main steps of the setups are also detailed in this YouTube video: SAS Portal Framework for SAS Viya - Open Source Project Overview.

While you will only have to do the setup once per environment, you might want to have multiple SAS Portals on the same SAS Viya environment. If that is the case then you will just need to unzip the sas-portal.zip file into another directory on the webserver and give each copy its own config.json with its portalFolderUri and optionally also its portalName — see Configuration.

Getting the Portal Bundle​

There are two ways to obtain the deployable sas-portal.zip:

  1. Download a prebuilt release (no build required). Each tagged version publishes a ready-to-deploy sas-portal.zip on the Releases page. Download the latest one and continue at the Webserver step. This is the quickest option — configure it on the web server with a config.json file (see Configuration).
  2. Build from source. Only needed if you want to change the portal itself or bake your configuration into the bundle; follow the steps below.

Build From Source​

Please note this is optional and you can skip ahead to the Deploy to a Webserver section if you are downloading the prebuild release via the Releases page.

Prerequisites​

You will need Node.js (v18 or later) to build the portal from source.

Building the Portal​

  1. Clone the repository and install dependencies:
git clone https://github.com/sassoftware/sas-portal-framework-for-sas-viya.git
cd sas-portal-framework-for-sas-viya
npm install

  1. Optionally change the built-in defaults in src/config.ts (viyaHost, portalFolderUri, portalName, showViyaLink — see Configuration). A config.json on the web server still overrides them.

  2. Build the portal:

npm run build

This will type-check, bundle, and create a sas-portal.zip file ready for deployment.

Deploy to a Webserver​

You will need a webserver where you deploy the built portal. You can use an Apache HTTP Web Server for this - see the example YAML to deploy it on kubernetes below.

Unzip the sas-portal.zip onto your web server. The zip contains all static files needed to run the portal, including the bundled application, CSS, and static assets.

Then create a config.json next to index.html — see Configuration. If you run the webserver under the same top level URL as the SAS Viya host and use the sample content, the defaults work and you can skip this.

Please note your webserver needs to have TLS configured, because SAS Viya will not accepts non-HTTPS request for authentication & authorization requests.

Example YAML for Deployment​

In order to make use of this example YAML you will have to overwrite the <> values.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: httpd-webserver-deployment
  labels:
    app: httpd-webserver
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: httpd-webserver
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: httpd-webserver
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: httpd-webserver
          image: httpd:2.4.57
          ports:
            - containerPort: 80
          volumeMounts:
            - name: httpd-webserver-volume
              mountPath: /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/httpd-webserver
      volumes:
        - name: httpd-webserver-volume
          nfs:
            server: <NFS_IP>
            path: "<PATH_FOR_MOUNT>" 
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: httpd-webserver-service
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  selector:
    app: httpd-webserver
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 443
    targetPort: 80
---
kind: Ingress
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: httpd-webserver-ingress
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  tls:
  - hosts:
    - <YOUR_HOST_URL>
    secretName: <TLS-SECRET>
  rules:
    - host: <YOUR_HOST_URL>
      http:
        paths: 
          - path: /httpd-webserver
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: httpd-webserver-service
                port:
                  number: 443

Configuration​

The portal reads its configuration from a config.json file next to index.html on the web server, so you can change it without rebuilding the portal. The bundle ships a config.example.json — copy it to config.json and edit the values:

{
    "portalFolderUri": "68384628-8305-4285-9f16-0cdc57d13dc5",
    "portalName": "SAS Portal",
    "showViyaLink": true
}
  • portalFolderUri, the URI of your portal content folder in SAS Viya. Go to the folder in SAS Environment Manager, select it and copy its URI — either the full /folders/folders/<id> or just the ID works. If you imported the sample content you can keep the default.
  • portalName, the name displayed in the top left of the portal navbar.
  • showViyaLink, set to false to hide the "Go to SAS Viya" link in the header.
  • viyaHost, the URL of your SAS Viya host (e.g. https://viya.example.com). Only needed if the portal is not hosted under the same top-level URL as SAS Viya; if left out, the portal uses its own origin.

Every setting is optional — anything left out (or everything, if there is no config.json) falls back to the built-in defaults from src/config.ts. Changes take effect on the next page load. If the file can't be read, the portal logs an error in the browser console and uses the built-in defaults.

The zip only contains config.example.json, so unzipping a newer release over an existing deployment keeps your config.json. If your deployment process replaces the whole directory instead, keep a copy of config.json and put it back afterwards — without it the portal silently uses the built-in defaults.

If you build from source, you can instead change the built-in defaults in src/config.ts (same settings), which are baked into the bundle.

Setup in SAS Environment Manager​

Next a SAS Administrator will have to perform the SAS Viya Platform Setup as described in the SAS Viya SDK documentation.

Sample Content​

If you want to use the sample content, then import the Portal-Content-EM.json and Content-EM.json using the Import page of SAS Environment Manager or using the transfer plugin of the SAS Viya CLI.

The examples include also static links to SAS Jobs. This applies to Use Case 1/interactiveContent-example.json where you will need to replace the URL with your Viya host. If you replace the file, you will need to update the portal-page-layout.json accordingly with the new file URI. The VA Test page also requires an additional setup: run the Load-HMEQ.sas file in Content/VA Reports, which will load the hmeq table from the built-in sampsio to the CAS Public library.

The sample content uses the default portalFolderUri, so no config.json change is needed for it.

Now the SAS Portal is ready to be used - the two following topics are fully optional.

[Optional] Integration with Content from SAS 9.4​

If you want to use this SAS Portal as a hybrid solution with SAS 9.4 content, you must remove the option Header set X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN from the SAS 9.4 Webserver configuration. See the SAS documentation.

The two types of content that are supported from SAS 9.4 are Stored Processes (STP) and Web Report Studio Reports (WRS Reports) in the View only mode. The integration is done using the Interactive-Content object.

CDN Dependencies​

The SAS SDKs and some third-party libraries are loaded via CDN at runtime from within the built index.html. The bundled application code and CSS are included in the build output.

The following CDN resources are used:

<!-- Bootstrap Style -->
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.1/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-4bw+/aepP/YC94hEpVNVgiZdgIC5+VKNBQNGCHeKRQN+PtmoHDEXuppvnDJzQIu9" crossorigin="anonymous">

<!-- Import SAS SDKs and Third-Party Utilities -->
<script src="https://cdn.developer.sas.com/packages/sas-auth-browser/latest/dist/index.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.developer.sas.com/packages/content-components/latest/dist/umd/content-sdk-components.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.developer.sas.com/packages/va-report-components/latest/dist/umd/va-report-components.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.1/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-HwwvtgBNo3bZJJLYd8oVXjrBZt8cqVSpeBNS5n7C8IVInixGAoxmnlMuBnhbgrkm" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script type="module" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/zerodevx/zero-md@2/dist/zero-md.min.js"></script>

If you need to self-host these dependencies (e.g., for air-gapped environments), download them and update the <script> and <link> tags in the built index.html to point to your local copies. Please note that the SAS Visual Analytics SDK is updated every stable cadence of SAS Viya and if you update your SAS Viya environment than you have to also update the resource here.