Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
94 lines (55 loc) · 6.05 KB

DEVELOPING.md

File metadata and controls

94 lines (55 loc) · 6.05 KB
Raw

Installation

  1. Get Docker so we can automatically run and setup Postgres
  2. Make sure you have node, yarn, and psql installed. yarn -v should be 1.x.x. Do not get Yarn 2. Node should also be version 14.x.x. If it's not, install nvm
  3. Run yarn install in this directory to get dependencies
  4. Run yarn dev:db:up to start the database via docker. yarn dev:db:down will stop it.
  5. Run psql -U postgres -h localhost to connect to your postgres instance, and run CREATE database dev; and CREATE database test; to initialize your databases for development and testing.
  6. Start the app in development with yarn dev
  7. Visit the app at http://localhost:3000

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to a member of the team. If you think this document can be improved, make a PR!

Technologies

  • Next.js lets us do server-side and client-side React rendering, as well as write backend API endpoints (we don't use this for KOH). It also gives us developer ergonomics like hot reload in dev.

  • nestjs runs our backend http api. It gives us controllers and services and helps neaten the code

  • Typescript lets us write maintainable, scalable Javascript

  • Postgresql is a very reliable and popular SQL database that is great for 99% of applications

  • TypeORM lets us query Postgres easily and with Typescript validating our schema.

  • Docker sets up a consistent Postgres + Redis environment on all developer's machines

  • Redis is used to enable 0 downtime deploy

  • Cypress is used for frontend E2E tests

File Structure

Source code is in the packages folder.

app is a the next.js app (frontend). Routing is done using the file system. For example, the page /app/pages/xyz.tsx would be served at domain.com/xyz. Pages are rendered server-side and hydrated client side. Data fetching can happen on the server or client. Learn more

server is the server (backend) that runs the REST API and websockets. Each API route is controlled by a module, with a controller and its modules. Learn more

api-client is a library to wrap network calls to the api in a neater, type-safe interface. Every backend route should be accessible through api-client

common is where common code, globals, and types go. It is imported into the other three packages.

The infrastructure folder is for docker and other deployment files. You can mostly ignore it.

Developing

Run yarn dev at root level to get everything running and hot-reloading. yarn test at root level runs all tests, but you can also selectively run tests by running yarn test while inside a package. Be sure to have the db running with yarn dev:db:up before running dev or tests.

Your IDE should do type-checking for you. You can run type-checks manually with yarn tsc.

Migrations

If you change an entity, you MUST run yarn migration:generate -n [migration-name], to make the migration file, then yarn typeorm migration:run will automatically run on deployment to staging/production. Commit the migration file to Git!

Adding an API Route

  1. Add its request body and response types in common
  2. Add routes to the NestJS server in server (using the common types) (to do this, read the NestJS docs, or refer to the wiki written in the future :P )
  3. Add client functions in api-client calling the endpoint (using the common types)

Adding to the frontend app

Every component in pages is served publicly. See https://nextjs.org/docs/routing/introduction. Break pages down into components and add to components folder. Each page should have the Navbar up top -- refer to other pages for each page. Consistency, consistency, consistency.

Testing

Integration and unit test files should be colocated with the file they test. One exception is app page tests (page folder is public, so tests can't go in there)

End to end (E2E) testing is in it's own folder and done with Cypress. These should be used to test core user flows. To run them headlessly (without a graphics server), do yarn cypress run. To watch them actually run interactively, you can use yarn cypress open. Be aware that this is super slow on local machines.

If your tests are failing with a message about "deadlock something whatever", do yarn test --run-in-band. This makes the tests run sequentially.

Installing new packages

Install packages from cd into the project you want to install the package for, then run yarn add <PACKAGE>. For instance, if you want to install a frontend package, cd packages/app and then yarn add <FRONTEND PACKAGE>

Style

Prettier, a highly opinionated code formatter, runs right before you commit to git. So don't worry about formatting your code! Prettier will clean it all up. You can also get the Prettier extension in most IDEs, or run yarn pretty-quick if you want to.

Production

If you have prod ssh access, deploy master to prod with ./deploy.sh <prod username>.

On the VM, source code is at /var/www/source. From there you can run yarn cli commands etc. Make an admin account with yarn cli create:admin <name> and give a password. Please auto-generate a random password.

If you need to hotfix something, you can edit the files on prod and run yarn build && env HOME=/var/www pm2 startOrReload infrastructure/prod/ecosystem.config.js to build and restart the server. Try to avoid doing this. You can also push something to master, and then use the deploy script. Note that it'll still take about 5 minutes for the changes to propogate to the dist folder