[Epic] Git Sync & Version Control #3199
Comments
Nikhil-Nandagopal
added
Epic
Nikhil-Nandagopal
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Git Version Control
areyabhishek
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the
Business Edition
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This would be an awesome feature! |
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Also slightly related: #3424. |
Nikhil-Nandagopal
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Git Version Control
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This would be a great addition! |
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This is for sure, my most anticipated feature :) |
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This is something we'd love as well. We see AppSmith as a nice companion to tools like Hasura. Open source, but with a SaaS option for cases where we can't/don't want to deal with hosting. The open source bit is important because it lets us run the full suite of tools on a developer machine (as opposed to something like Retool). With Hasura, we love the declarative configuration, which you can export/import, and allows a developer to create a configuration locally and apply it in staging/prod. Environment variables are used for things like api, endpoints, secrets, etc. The reason this could be so magical with a tool like AppSmith is it would allow a developer who has intimate knowledge of the system they are building to quickly put together admin tools as a part of that system. With platforms like Retool, etc. the admin side feels pretty disconnected from dev. It feels like an "addon" rather than part of a system. For us, this is the potential differentiator with platforms like Retool. For now, the differentiator is more control, which is honestly far less appealing. Maybe cost? Depends on the setup. |
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@ec-raphael that's a really neat take on this feature. We'd love to hear more from you on your thoughts about this as a product differentiator. Would you be up for a quick chat? This is my calendly, I'd love for just 30mins of your time to hear your ideas |
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I'm in the same situation as @ec-raphael, currently, we are using Hasura with retool to quickly build out some proof of concepts. The only reason we are using retool is that it has better graphql support. I was very tempted to use app smith anyways, because I love the direction, but asking other devs to manually translate grapqhl in regular post requests was too much. Even with that, if there were git versioning, I think we would have gone with app smith. I even considered using appsmith with a mongo docker instance, that had it's db volume mounted inside our git repo, so we could just commit that, but it seemed a little too janky. I don't think I want to see what a merge conflict would look like. While your considering this, I just wanted to point out that hasura uses yaml, and nx.dev uses json to keep track generated things. Having dealt with merge conflicts in each, yaml is soooooooo much easier to handle conflicts in. Not having all the opening and closing brackets (which don't technically conflict), is really helpful. If git integration does happen, I would use app smith for sooooo so many projects, that I use CRA, or nextjs with vercel for now. Especially if you can create a vercel like workflow for deployments. Great project! Keep up the awesome work! |
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OH, I got carried away and forgot the original reason I commented. Since you are using mongo now, it might not be that hard to implement this feature using https://github.com/louischatriot/nedb |
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HI @ericwooley thanks for your input! YAML does seem like a better option for resolving conflicts. We're now releasing a quick import/export feature which you can write a job on top of to commit to git. We'll work on improving this to directly sync to GitHub as well and include YAML instead of JSON as an option. I'm interested to know what you feel is lacking in our GraphQL Support. Would you be up for a quick chat regarding this? |
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The lack of version control is a major blocker in my experience for getting teams approval for appsmith or similar. It would make a pivotal difference if appsmith had this ability! :) |
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Hi @ereio 👋 We're picking this up soon! You can expect to see something by end of July :) |
Nikhil-Nandagopal
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Platform
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Business Edition
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Showing Difference for JSON can be something similar to the UI in DiffyCurl |
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Adding the Testplan Link here for reference https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bLZb7lDy8CySKa0oByFUS7ICw3BWfnMKZxqqwr8dxHE/edit#gid=0\ |
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Pending decisions/inputs needed:
More details can be found here: https://www.notion.so/appsmith/Gitsync-and-version-control-0c0ef0365495400db85e7e209c3d6c79#a6ee85d90c0740028198696683776a59 |
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Blockers for going to prod with the beta version:
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Next set of action items:
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Nikhil-Nandagopal
assigned hiteshjoshi, vuiets and appsmith-bot and unassigned appsmith-bot
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Posting the updates from the last catchup, for ref: BE:
FE
Design
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Design changes:
Action items:
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Next set of action
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Next set of action
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Closing this. |
Problem statement
Today we get a lot of requests around migrating applications between instances as well as moving applications across organizations.
There is also a need to have some kind of version control that will make it easy to restore the state of applications.
This should also make it easy for other developers in a team to do code reviews of changes to applications.
Changes to an application by a developer should not overwrite the changes other developers make.
Related issues
Solution
The Story
Discovery
A developer comes to appsmith and wants to try it out. She runs a docker command and gets it running on her local system #4430. A browser window opens and she is welcomed. She mentions that she is developing locally and the mode of the app changes to offline mode. She goes through our onboarding. She is prompted to connect to her data source. She is able to easily connect to her local API / DB without NGrok. She is in an offline mode and is not able to share/invite users to her application.
Sharing
She builds her first application with a lot of excitement and wants to share it so everyone gets access to it. This prompts her to connect a Git Repository and select a directory to commit her app & docker-compose file to. The readme of the repository is also updated with
https://github.com/Nikhil-Nandagopal/codesandbox
After the git repo is connected, the user is asked to connect to deploy a cloud version and is prompted to either select appsmith cloud or their own private cloud. Selecting appsmith cloud will ask the user to create / sign in to an account. Once this is successful, the user has to select an organisation and the app gets created in that org.
If the user select private cloud, they are prompted to deploy appsmith using the steps below
They must then enter the URL of their appsmith login page and follow the steps to login / select the org.
She accesses her appsmith cloud and is prompted to create the datasources that she created locally. She then invites all her users to use the app. She should be able to change the cloud environment she is pointing to.
Iteration
Her users get invites to the application and begin trying it out. They leave her feedback using the commenting feature which she receives via email. She opens the application on her local and is able to see all the comments. She creates a branch of the application and makes changes to it. She configures new datasources on this branch that point to her staging environment. She is able to make changes to the application on this branch and test them out. She then hits deploy which commits the changes to the new git branch and she is given the link of the branch. She now raises a pull request from this branch to master and pings a colleague to review/test the changes. The colleague goes over the PR, uses a visual diff tool, tests it, and approves it. The PR is merged to master and the new changes of the application are deployed to all users. The actions do not change the datasource they were pointing to on merge.
Evangelism
As more developers review her PR, they are able to see a link of the cloud instance of the tool in the PR to review & test. They try out the tool and are automatically able to get access to it by authenticating with a common Google domain or setting it up locally.
They begin to learn more about the tool and try to create an app. All the underlying deployment & environment infrastructure is already set up for them. New developers in the team are easily able to check out the app locally and request access to take their changes online.
Every new app developed locally must be committed to a git repo and select an organization in the cloud to be a part of.
Git Syncing
App branches may go out of sync or have merge conflicts and we should intimate developers of this and allow them to manually update their branches as well as inform them of conflicts and links of where to resolve them.
Users can authentication with a git repo specifying their username/password or their public key.
Users should enter the git path to connect to a repo.
Every commit should autogenerate a message. Users can manually specify a message for certain commits.
(Enhancement) Allow users to authenticate with Github to select their git repo and credentials.
Summary
CE Constraints
Flows
Details
The Git Repository must have a clean human-readable structure.
Pages
-- Page1
-- Widgets
---- Widget1
---- Widget2
---- Widget3
-- Actions
---- Action1
---- Action2
Datasources
-- Datasource1
Each widget / action / data source should have a clean JSON of it's properties
The git repository must have a readme with the information of the application and appsmith.
Figma
https://www.figma.com/file/TdPXDzYZvb11PYUmVAU4r1/Local-Dev-Flows?node-id=0%3A1&viewport=683%2C-1019%2C0.2663029432296753
https://www.figma.com/file/dHbJ2KNXa9597W6BzsFIuE/Local-Dev-Git-Sync?node-id=1%3A594
Test env
http://ec2-3-108-64-217.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com
Docs (wip)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1765hZEen2sip_LwXF5C9_hfTLE7FZaM9X4zAo_gCHrc/edit?usp=sharing
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