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Contributing

The PostGraphile project welcomes all contributors, we want to invest in you so you can invest back into PostGraphile. Together we can make great software that enables developers to build powerful applications in much less time then would previously have been taken. This document aims to help you get started contributing to the project.

Development environment

First of all, our development environment is focussed around Unix tools. If you are on Windows, you may need to use something like Docker or a VM to help you develop.

Since PostGraphile is mostly powered by Graphile Engine the best way to develop it is to do it in the context of a Graphile Engine build so that you may dig into the depths if you need to.

Yarn

We use yarn workspaces, so it's very important that you use the yarn package manager rather an npm whilst developing PostGraphile.

npm install -g yarn

Before we start, check that you're running up to date versions of the relevant tools, you should be running at least:

$ node --version
v10.13.0
$ yarn --version
1.12.1
$ git --version
git version 2.18.0
$ watchman --version # optional
4.9.0

(If you don't have watchman that's fine, but it helps when watching large numbers of files. On Mac you can install it using homebrew: brew install watchman)

To get started, we're going to check out graphile-engine, and then we're going to check out postgraphile inside of graphile-engine. With a few tweaks this will enable postgraphile to use the development version of the modules in graphile-engine without needing to perform yarn link etc.

It should be safe to copy and paste these commands into your terminal (one at a time), but if you're using zsh you may want to run this first so that comments are ignored:

set -k

Setup

Okay, here's the setup:

# Clone graphile-engine:
git clone git@github.com:graphile/graphile-engine.git graphile-engine

# Clone postgraphile _inside of_ graphile-engine:
git clone git@github.com:graphile/postgraphile.git graphile-engine/postgraphile

########################################

# Initial setup for graphile-engine
cd graphile-engine

# Install deps:
yarn
# Monorepo stuff:
yarn lerna bootstrap
# Run initial build:
yarn prepack:all

########################################

# Initial setup for postgraphile
cd postgraphile

# Install deps:
yarn
# Remove deps that should be served by the parent graphile-engine:
./rmlocal.sh
# Builds GraphiQL, images, etc so they can be require()d:
yarn make-assets

Database setup

For testing, PostGraphile of course requires a Postgres database. Download and install it, e.g. with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib postgresql-client-common

Then we need to set up a superuser (who can install extensions) and create test databases for the individual test suites. You can use the command line utilities or go with psql:

sudo -u postgres psql
  CREATE ROLE me WITH LOGIN SUPERUSER; -- PASSWORD 'mypassword'
  SET ROLE me;
  CREATE DATABASE postgraphile_test;
  COMMENT ON DATABASE postgraphile_test IS 'https://github.com/graphile/postgraphile';
  CREATE DATABASE graphileengine_test;
  COMMENT ON DATABASE graphileengine_test IS 'https://github.com/graphile/graphile-engine';

You may use the default postgres superuser instead of your own one if you prefer. Using your OS login for naming the user me requires fewer customisations down the road, as on many systems it will be the default.

The lds package uses another database lds_test, this should be created automatically by its yarn db:init script.

To allow login without a password (please evaluate your own security requirements), you may change the pg_hba.conf so that the user is always accepted from the local machine:

# for postgraphile testing
local	postgraphile_test,graphileengine_test,lds_test	all				trust
host	postgraphile_test,graphileengine_test,lds_test	me	127.0.0.1/32		trust
host	postgraphile_test,graphileengine_test,lds_test	me	::1/128			trust

You don't need to install Postgres locally, running it on an external server or in a Docker container works as well. See below for how to make your database connections known to the test runner.

Developing

Graphile Engine

Graphile Engine is built in a mixture of TypeScript and Flow (we're slowly migrating to TypeScript); which means it has a compile step. For developer productivity we don't incur this compilation cost every time we run the development version of PostGraphile, instead we require the compiled code in most places. This means that we must watch the source code for changes so that when we run the compiled code it's not out of date. To do this, in the root of graphile-engine, run yarn watch:

yarn watch

This will compile everything, and then monitor for changes and compile just the changed files. Every time a file is compiled it will be listed in the output - be careful to check for errors!

You should leave this watch process running, so open another terminal to do further work.

PostGraphile

First, change into the postgraphile directory (graphile-engine/postgraphile/).

To run PostGraphile in development, you can use the scripts/dev command. This command emulates the postgraphile command, and it has two modes. If you want the scripts/dev command to exit when postgraphile would, add two hyphens, e.g.

# Will run once and exit on error or `-X` option
scripts/dev -- -c postgres://localhost/my_db -s my_schema --watch --enhance-graphiql

The -- makes scripts/dev act more like a regular build - i.e. exiting on the -X commands or when an error occurs.

If, however, you want scripts/dev to automatically restart whenever you change the PostGraphile or Graphile Engine source code, run it without the --. To manually restart the server type in rs and hit enter while scripts/dev is running.

# Will monitor the source for changes and restart automatically
scripts/dev -c postgres://localhost/my_db -s my_schema --watch --enhance-graphiql

Updating or changing branches

Due to this peculiar setup, when you want to update or switch branches, you have to do an extra couple steps than you might expect.

Graphile Engine

(In the graphile-engine folder.)

Thanks to yarn workspaces, updating the graphile-engine folder is straightforward:

git pull --rebase # or checkout a branch, or whatever
yarn # update deps

If you're running yarn watch in the graphile-engine folder then it's probably a good idea to restart it incase any of the dependencies have changed.

PostGraphile

(In the graphile-engine/postgraphile folder.)

git pull --rebase # or checkout a branch, or whatever
yarn # update deps
./rmlocal.sh # Remove deps that should be served by the parent graphile-engine

The ./rmlocal.sh script is the one you must remember to run again - otherwise yarn will restore the release versions of postgraphile-core, graphile-build-pg and graphile-build, thus your local changes won't be represented.

Tests

PostGraphile uses Jest for testing to take advantage of Jest’s snapshot feature. We test against a local database, so make sure it is set up. PostgreSQL is by default running on localhost:5432 (if that port isn't already used).

Graphile Engine

Graphile Engine uses a user-configurable test database, for example graphileengine_test:

createdb graphileengine_test

The tests of the postgraphile-core, graphile-utils and pg-pubsub packages use the TEST_DATABASE_URL environment variable, which is mandatory. Its format is a connection URL, passed to [node-postgres](https://node-postgres.com/features/connecting#Connection URI).

The lds and subscriptions-lds packages' test commands will create and use a new "lds_test" database using the createdb command. If you cannot make createdb run directly without options (e.g. if you're not using trust authentication) then you may set the LDS_TEST_DATABASE_URL environment variable and seed the DB and run the tests manually (see the relevant package.json to see what is done by the yarn test command). Alternatively, set the environment variables for createdb to direct it your server. Note: before you can run those tests, you'll need to configure your PostgreSQL server to support logical decoding for the live queries tests. See the @graphile/lds README for how to enable wal_level = logical.

We must then export this TEST_DATABASE_URL environment variable so the tests know where to install. WARNING: this database will be overwritten!

# assuming passwordless login is set up
export TEST_DATABASE_URL="postgres://localhost/graphileengine_test"

Then you can run the tests with

yarn test

This takes a while; I'd advise that you focus on the integration tests in postgraphile-core in most cases; and since we're using jest you can pass a filter such as queries to only run tests with a file name that contains the word queries:

cd packages/postgraphile-core
yarn test queries

PostGraphile

To run PostGraphile tests you will need to first create the postgraphile_test database:

createdb postgraphile_test

The PostGraphile tests use the TEST_PG_URL environment variable as a connection URL, which can be overwritten. (This differs from the Graphile Engine TEST_DATABASE_URL to avoid conflicts between these two independent test suites.) The default value is 'postgres:///postgraphile_test'.

Then run the test suite with:

yarn test

When developing PostGraphile, we recommend using the Jest watch mode feature. So instead you would run tests like so:

yarn test --watch

(If you get an error about too many open files, consider installing watchman as mentioned above.)

Now, only the tests in the files you have changed will be run. There are some slow tests in the PostGraphile suite so hopefully this should make your development time faster. Once you are in watch mode, Jest will present you with some options you can use to better configure your testing experience.

Snapshots

We make use of the Jest snapshot feature. Even when you change small things the snapshot tests are likely to fail, this is expected. To update the snapshots so that the tests pass again, you can press u if you're running in watch mode, or you can run yarn test -u. You should carefully review the changes to the snapshots to ensure they're what you intended. Commit the changes to the snapshots and the changed snapshots will be reviewed along with the rest of your changes in the PR review process.

Linting

PostGraphile uses ESLint and Travis CI to test builds and enforce lint rules: travis-ci.org/graphile/postgraphile.

GraphiQL

The instance of GraphiQL used by PostGraphile is a create-react-app located in postgraphiql. When developing PostGraphile (running scripts/dev only), GraphiQL will run on a different port to take advantage of the create-react-app developer experience.

Note that postgraphiql has it's own package.json and yarn.lock because it depends on a specific version of GraphQL which is different from the wide range supported by PostGraphile/Graphile Engine. When we build PostGraphile before publishing (with scripts/build), GraphiQL is built into a resources served by the PostGraphile middleware people import into their projects.

Commit messages

PostGraphile team use karma-style commit messages: a type (feat/fix/chore/docs/etc.), a scope (graphql/postgraphile/examples/tests) and then the commit message. Commit messages are written in the imperative tense.

Here’s a few examples:

feat(ci): run against multiple postgres versions
fix(postgraphile): fix opaque error messages
chore(docs): rename anonymous role to default role

When committing to a branch or a PR you do not need to adhere to this format. However, all commits to the master branch must be in this format. Often all of the commits in a PR will be squashed and a commit message of this format will be written to summarize the changes.

You must use one of the following types:

  • chore
  • docs
  • feat
  • fix
  • refactor
  • style
  • test

Common scopes are as follows. You are not required to use any of the following scopes and may instead invent your own. These are just a few that get commonly used.

  • *
  • postgraphile
  • graphql
  • interface
  • postgres
  • package
  • scripts
  • examples
  • ci

Resources

Here are some resources that will help you learn more about Postgres and GraphQL so that you may understand more of what is going on inside PostGraphile.