colab

A Digital Lab for the co-Design, co-Development and co-Evaluation of Digital Learning Games

reports

setup

postgresql

Install

Install fresh postgresql in docker

docker run -d -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_DB=colab -e POSTGRES_USER=colab -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<YOUR_SECRET_PASSWORD> --name colab_postgres -d postgres:14-alpine

You may want to add --restart always to the docker run command.

Setup a 2nd database for tests

Configure test database

echo "CREATE USER \"colab_test\" WITH PASSWORD '1234';
CREATE DATABASE \"colab_test\" OWNER \"colab_test\";" |  docker exec colab_postgres psql -U colab

Mail Hog

create en email testing tool

docker run -d --restart always -p 8025:8025 -p 1025:1025 mailhog/mailhog

MongoDB (optional)

run a MongoDB for file persistence. If file persistence is not needed, edit colab-webapp/colab.properties and set the config value colab.jcr.mongodb.uri= to an empty string.

docker run -d --restart always -p 27017:27017 --name colab_mongo mongo:4.4

Compile

Tools & version to use

• java11 & maven
• node
• yarn

command line

Rebuild everything with :

mvn clean install

Rebuild everything but skip tests with :

mvn -DskipTests clean install

Maven Site

PMD and other tools may fails the build. You may want to consult human-readable reports.

Regenerate maven site:

mvn -Dreporting clean -DskipTests install
mvn -Dreporting site site:stage

And open ./target/staging/index.html

Run (development)

Configuration file

Copy ./colab-webapp/default_colab.properties to ./colab-webapp/colab.properties and edit the colab. Edit ./colab-webapp/colab.properties to match

#
# coLAB properties
#######################

## Database
colab.database.user=colab
colab.database.password=<YOUR_SECRET_PASSWORD>
colab.database.name=colab

colab.default.admin.username=
colab.default.admin.email=
colab.default.admin.password=

The ./colab-webapp/colab.properties is your own configuration file and will never be committed. So you can safely put secrets in it.

Dev tooltips

One would not mvn clean install each time a small change is made. Here is some hints to rebuild relevant modules only.

Deploy the way

Simplest way to deploy the web app is to use the provided run script:

cd colab-webapp
./run

You way have a look on run options:

./run -h

Hot re-deploy

Some commands listed below require to re-deploy the app. You can do a full, complete reload by killing the ./run script and running it again.

Or you can do it the quick way: `touch colab-webapp/target/coLAB/.reload'

Changes in the data model

When changes are made to the data model, the database must be updated to reflect these changes.

As explained above, two databases are used:

1. the first to run tests: the "colab_test" database);
2. the second for live usage (local dev, prod, ...): the "colab" database.

The way in which these changes are reflected is different in each case.

Test database

The test database is automatically reset before running the tests (JPA drop-and-create strategy). Thus, all data are loss... But the database structure is up-to-date regarding the datamodel.

Live Database

Data loss is not an option for the live database. Thus, database must be thoroughly migrated to reflect the JPA model.

Such refactors are defined with the help of LiquiBase. They are applied during the deploymenet of the webapp. They're stored in the colab-api/src/main/resources/META-INF/dbchangelogs/.

Writing those changeLogs may be painfull. Luckily, LiquiBase ships with handy tools (dowload here) to ease writing changeLogs. We are especially interested in the diffChangeLog tool.

This tool compute a changeLog between a database and a reference. In our case, the database is the live database, the reference is the test database. Here is an script which stores the diff changeLog in a XML file named after the current timestamp.

#!/bin/bash

LIQUIBASE_FOLDER=<PATH TO THE LIQUIBASE FOLDER YOU JUST DOWNLOADED>

## The 'production' database
FROM_PG_HOST=localhost
FROM_PG_PORT=5432
FROM_DB_NAME=colab
FROM_USER=colab
FROM_PASSWORD=<PASSWORD>

## The 'test' database
TO_PG_HOST=localhost
TO_PG_PORT=5432
TO_DB_NAME=colab_test
TO_USER=colab_test
TO_PASSWORD=<PASSWORD>

FILENAME=`date +"%s"`.xml

${LIQUIBASE_FOLDER}/liquibase \
    --changeLogFile=${FILENAME} \
    --url="jdbc:postgresql://${FROM_PG_HOST}:${FROM_PG_PORT}/${FROM_DB_NAME}" \
    --username=${FROM_USER} \
    --password=${FROM_PASSWORD} \
    diffChangeLog \
    --referenceUrl="jdbc:postgresql://${TO_PG_HOST}:${TO_PG_PORT}/${TO_DB_NAME}" \
    --referencePassword=${TO_PASSWORD} \
    --referenceUsername=${TO_USER}

DIFF_RC=$rc

if [[ "$?" -ne 0 ]] ; then
  echo 'could not generate diff';
  exit $DIFF_RC;
else
  echo
  echo 'Sucessfull!'
  echo
  echo "Please review the changeLog (${FILENAME}) then";
  echo '  1. move it to the changelogs directory: '
  echo "       mv ${FILENAME} colab-api/src/main/resources/META-INF/dbchangelogs/"
  echo '  2. rebuild the war'
  echo '       mvn -pl colab-api,colab-webapp -DskipTests=true -DskipWebappYarn=true install'
  echo '  3. hot-deploy the app'
  echo '       touch colab-webapp/target/coLAB/.reload'
  echo
  exit $DIFF_RC;
fi

Summary

1. Do changes in the datamodel and re-build colab-api
2. Run any test (eg. ProjectRestEndpointTest#testUpdateProject)
3. Execute the diff script
4. Review the changeLog
5. Move it to the changelogs directory and rebuild the app
6. Re-deploy

Resources

• Download liquibase CLI https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/releases
• Liquibase Changes documentation https://docs.liquibase.com/change-types/home.html

Notes

Changing the data model is quite a big change, server, clients and webapp must be compiled:

mvn -DskipTests -pl colab-api,colab-client,colab-webapp install

re-deploy is required

REST API

REST API changes requires to compile server, clients and webapp:

mvn -DskipTests -pl colab-api,colab-client,colab-webapp install

re-deploy is required

Server internal changes

Since the API will not change,no need to recompile clients. Moreover, there is no need to rebuild the webapp. This can be skipped by setting the skipWebappYarn property.

mvn -DskipTests -DskipWebappYarn -pl colab-api,colab-webapp install

re-deploy is required

Webapp

The mvn -pl colab-webapp install command will compile a production version of the webapp. This is not required for local developemnt.

In this case, one would run the webpack dev-server with

cd colab-webapp/src/main/node/app
yarn start

The webapp will be available on http://localhost:3004

When using webpack-dev-server, one could add -DskipWebappYarn to each maven command