Admin UI

This directory contains the client-side code for CockroachDB's web-based admin UI, which provides details about a cluster's performance and health. See the Admin UI docs for an expanded overview.

Getting Started

To start developing the UI, be sure you're able to build and run a CockroachDB node. Instructions for this are located in the top-level README. Every Cockroach node serves the UI, by default on port 8080, but you can customize the port with the --http-port flag. If you've started a node with the default options, you'll be able to access the UI at http://localhost:8080.

Our UI is compiled using a collection of tools that depends on Node.js and are managed with Yarn, a package manager that offers more deterministic package installation than NPM. NodeJS 6.x and Yarn 0.22.0 are known to work.

With Node and Yarn installed, bootstrap local development by running make in this directory. This will run yarn install to install our Node dependencies, run the tests, and compile the assets. Asset compilation happens in two steps. First, Webpack runs the TypeScript compiler and CSS preprocessor to assemble assets into the dist directory. Then, we package those assets into embedded.go using go-bindata. When you later run make build in the parent directory, embedded.go is linked into the cockroach binary so that it can serve the admin UI when you run cockroach start.

Developing

When making changes to the UI, it is desirable to see those changes with data from an existing cluster without rebuilding and relaunching the cluster for each change. This is useful for rapidly visualizing local development changes against a consistent and realistic dataset.

We've created a simple NodeJS proxy to accomplish this. This server serves all requests for web resources (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) out of the code in this directory, while proxying all API requests to the specified CockroachDB node.

To use this proxy, run ./proxy.js <target-cluster-http-uri> and navigate to http://localhost:3000 to access the UI.

When you're ready to submit your changes, be sure to run make in this directory to regenerate the on-disk assets so that your commit includes the updated embedded.go. This is enforced by our build system, but forgetting to do this will result in wasted time waiting for CI. We commit this generated file so that CockroachDB can be compiled with minimal non-go dependencies.

Be sure to also commit modifications resulting from dependency changes, like updates to package.json and yarn.lock.

Running tests

If you'd like to run the tests directly you can run make test. If you're having trouble debugging tests, we recommend using make test-debug which prettifies the test output and runs the tests in Chrome. When a webpage opens, you can press the debug button in the top right-hand corner to run tests and set breakpoints directly in the browser.