Added a small readme to the repo

Author: falquaddoomi

README.md

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+# SVIP
+
+## Main components:
+
+This top-level project coordinates three sub-projects that compose SVIP:
+1. **g2p-aggregator:** contains the pipeline (in `g2p-aggregator/harvester`) that populates the variant database,
+2. **svip_api:** the API server that serves data from the database to the front-end,
+3. **svip-o-vue:** the web front-end (whose repo is managed by Vital IT).
+
+`docker-compose.yml` is the main configuration file for launching the set of containers
+that compose the complete SVIP system. It includes definitions for a few other essential
+services, such as the Postgres database and local copy of the Universal Transcript Archive
+(UTA). These are built from Docker Hub images and thus don't have any local data
+in this repo.
+
+The top-level git project includes the three sub-projects as git submodules. Typically,
+we commit to the coordinating project when we want to declare that all the sub-projects
+are compatible with each other at that point in their respective commit histories. We'll
+also add tags to the coordinating repo (and probably the sub-repos as well) when we
+perform official releases.
+
+# Notes and other components:
+
+There are currently three environments in which the project can run:
+- **local**, in which the API server runs on port 8085, the front-end runs on 8080,
+and the database server is accessible for debugging on port 30432.
+- **dev**, which typically is deployed to the svip-dev server.
+- **external**, which typically is deployed to svip-test.
+
+All the environments require that docker and docker-compose are installed.
+
+The `deployment` folder contains (work-in-progress) scripts that facilitate deployment
+and synchronization across the three environments.
+
+Other random folders:
+- `sql_scratch` contains scratch SQL scripts used for ad-hoc analyses.
+- `notebooks` contains some Jupyter notebooks for ad-hoc analyses.
+- `staging` is used as a temporary directory by the deployment scripts.
+- `assets` contains artwork and other static assets used in the front-end and promotional.
+- `svip_db_backups` stores snapshots of the database, retrieved from svip-dev.
+- `kibana` contains configuration info for g2p-aggregator's original front-end.
+(It's essentially an artifact of the g2p-aggregator project and isn't used by SVIP.)
+- `outputs` contains a few dumps of information retrieved from some of the sources
+for reference purposes.