customization-guide.md

Customization guide

So you've decided to build your own Flex marketplace using the template. That's awesome! This guide will help you in setting up your fork and describes the general workflow.

Note: If you cloned the repository like described in the Quick start section of the project README file, you probably don't want to make the customizations in that project. Forking the repository is the recommended way to proceed. Follow this guide for instructions.

Requirements

Install required tools:

• Node.js
• Yarn

Technologies

Depending on what you want to change in the template, various skills help in achieving your goal. Some of the basic customizations don't require specific coding skills, but many customisations become technically involved. We've tried to keep the technology setup as simple as possible, and frontend developers with experience in widely used tooling should feel comfortable right from the get-go.

Here are some main technologies that the template uses:

• JavaScript: programming language for the whole application
• React: library for creating user interfaces with components
• CSS: styling the user interface using CSS Modules and cssnext
• Redux: state and data flow handling
• Final Form: forms
• React Router: routing
• Express: server

Setup

To start a new customization project, you should create a separate Git repository and setup the Git remotes so that you can pull in changes from the main (upstream) repository to your custom repository.

Fork the repository

See the Fork a repo documentation for instructions for forking a repository in GitHub.

In the directory you want to create the project in:

git clone git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_FORK.git                         # clone your fork
cd YOUR_FORK                                                                 # changed to the cloned directory
git remote add upstream git@github.com:sharetribe/flex-template-web.git      # add the template as the upstream remote

See also the Configuring a remote for a fork documentation.

Pull in latest upstream changes

If you want to update your local customization project with changes in the template, you should pull in changes from the upstream remote.

Note: Depending on the changes you've made to the template, this might be hard/impossible depending on what has changed in the template. You should mainly think of the template being the starting point of your customization, not something that is constantly updated.

In the master branch (or in the branch you want to merge in the upstream changes):

1. Fetch the latest changes from the upstream repository:

   git fetch upstream

2. Merge the changes to your local branch

   git merge upstream/master

3. Fix possible merge conflicts, commit, and push/deploy.

See also the Syncing a fork documentation.

Configuration

There are some mandatory configuration, and some configuration that you most likely want to at least go through.

To get started, first copy the config template:

cp .env-template .env

The .env file is the place to add your local configuration. It is ignored in Git, so you'll have to add the corresponding configuration also to your server environment.

There are some mandatory configuration variables that are defined in the template. See the Environment configuration variables documentation for more information.

See also the src/config.js file for more configuration options.

Development

In your project root, install dependencies:

yarn install

To develop the application and to see changes live, start the frontend development server:

yarn run dev

Known issues:

• Adding/changing imports may not be synced properly with ESLint. You may see an error Unable to resolve path to module even though the module existing in right path. Restarting the server doesn't help. To solve the issue, you need to make a change to the file where the error occurs.

Development Server

The usual way to develop the application is to use the frontend development server (see above). However, in production you likely want to use the server rendering setup. To develop the server rendering setup locally, run:

yarn run dev-server

This runs the frontend production build and starts the Express.js server in server/index.js that renders the application routes in the server. The server is automatically restarted when there are changes in the server/ directory.

Note: this server does not pick up changes in the frontend application code. For that you need to build the client bundle by restarting the server manually.

Tests

To start the test watcher, run

yarn test

See more in the testing documentation.

Customization

There are many things that you should change in the default template, and many more that you can change. See the Customization checklist documentation for more information.