npld-player

Secured browser for accessing NPLD content in Legal Deposit Library reading rooms.

Development

Quickstart

Copy environment variables:

cp sample.env .env

Install and run app locally:

yarn && yarn start

Version management

The npm version system handles versions and git tags. With everything committed, e.g.

npm version prerelease

Updates the ...alpha.X number. Other options are major/minor/patch. Then push the tags, and go to the relevant Actions workflow to initiate a binary build. This creates a draft release that should then be published as a pre-release or full release as appropriate. After that, people can download the new version.

Icon generation

convert icons/ld-player.png -define icon:auto-resize=256,128,64,48,32,16 icons/ld-player.ico

Deployment

This product is only intended to be deployed by Legal Deposit libraries. Binaries are not publicly available, but staff can get in touch with UKWA staff to be given access to the https://github.com/ukwa/npld-player-builds project where those binaries can be accessed.

Configuration Management

Note that the values of the configuration variables are are baked-in at build time using the EnvironmentPlugin. This is necessary for the authentication token as we don't want it to be accessible as an environment variable when deployed in reading rooms.

Where needed, environment variables can be overridden at runtime, but note that each variable needs to be specified explicitly in the code in order to allow this to happen.

Installation

After the installation, it is necessary to set up some environment variables so the Player knows which service to talk to. For example, for the BL Staff Alpha service, we use the blstaff-alpha.ldls.org.uk domain. To set up the NPLD Player to use this domain, set:

NPLD_PLAYER_PREFIX=https://blstaff-alpha.ldls.org.uk/

To point to a specific starting page (e.g. a test page) an additional variable is needed:

NPLD_PLAYER_PREFIX=https://blstaff-alpha.ldls.org.uk/
NPLD_PLAYER_INITIAL_WEB_ADDRESS=https://blstaff-alpha.ldls.org.uk/test_alpha.html

Note that the NPLD_PLAYER_PREFIX defines the URLs that the NPLD Player will render. Any URLs outside that scope get passed to the user's default desktop browser.

TBC: The NPLD_PLAYER_ENABLE_PRINT variable can also be set to true or false depending on whether printing is desired.