Streamline developer experience by making UI load faster by default

[f-PLT]

Summary

Fixes comments from previous PR #829 .

List of Changes

• Makes the base UI Docker self-sufficient
• Add a try/catch to vite.config to identify clearly when a local docker image is used for the frontend

Detailed Description

As suggested, the UI docker approach is now completely self-sufficient and separated from a developer's local development setup for the UI.

A developer wanting to work on the UI with docker now doesn't need to have Node installed locally at all (although at some point it still is worth it to do so). A developer working locally will have node/yarn installed locally should see their workflow stays the same as before.

The change proposed to ui/vite.config.ts is because currently, building the UI requires access to the commit history to tag each build. While copying the .git folder at build time could work, it would also have required to change the whole build context of the UI service, remove the ui/ folder from the main .dockerignore and possibly refactor all the other docker files in the project to make sure no adverse effects came of such a change.

Since we are considering reworking the docker files soon anyway, I figured it wasn't worth the trouble right now. It does also have the benefit of clearly signaling that a pre-build docker image is being used and reminds the user to make sure to rebuild the image when necessary.

Using the optional compose override still displays the appropriate build number, like before.

How to Test the Changes

1. Standard development: will use a pre-built version of the frontend that will not have hot-reloading enabled, but will make startup time faster when restarting the stack.

# Start the whole compose stack
docker compose up -d

# To stream the logs
docker compose logs -f django celeryworker ui
# Ctrl+c to close the logs

If there's a need to update the frontend while the compose stack is running, use the following command to rebuild the frontend and load the new changes
(and remember to refresh your browser after!).

docker compose stop ui && docker compose build ui &&  docker compose up ui -d

2. With Hot Reload UI: Hot reload is enabled for frontend development, but the primary web interface will be slow to load at startup and later restarts.

# Run docker compose with the override config
docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose-frontend-dev.override.yml up -d

Screenshots

N/A

Deployment Notes

Potentially worth to make sure that the changes to vite.config.ts do not cause unforeseen problems with the Netlify deployment structure

Checklist

• I have tested these changes appropriately.
• I have added and/or modified relevant tests.
• I updated relevant documentation or comments.
• I have verified that this PR follows the project's coding standards.
• Any dependent changes have already been merged to main.

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