Datalab Client Application

PMA2020 Datalab client

Setup

To get the application setup just:

• Clone the repository
• Create an env.js from the example at env.js.example
• Run npm install to get dependencies
• Run bundle install to get Middleman/Ruby dependencies

Setting up the Environment

In order to make the app more flexible for differenet environments (development, staging, production, etc) we utilize a env.js file to describe the environment for the client application. Your actual env.js should never be committed.

Currently the options are:

• api_url: The url you would like to use for the API. This will hard default to http://api.pma2020.org
• environment: The environment you are using
• version: The version # of the client application. This should be incremented using Semantic Versioning on every deploy.

Development

During development we are using Webpack to manage assets including Javascript and CSS files. Normally you would have to run a webpack server along side things but this is abstracted away via Middleman.

To run a development server just use the command: middleman server

Testing

Unit Tests use Karma and Chai. To run,

• Ensure node dependencies are installed with npm install.
• Run npm run test:unit.
• Karma will instruct you to open a browser to run the tests.

Blackbox testing uses Selenium. To run,

• Ensure node dependencies are installed with npm install.
• Can be run with default config using npm test:selenium.

To run all tests,

• Use the command make test or npm run test.

Note that if running all tests, some versions of Karma appear to have a bug where the server does not close automatically; therefore you should exit the first command automatically after it finishes.

Building and Deploying

The Datalab Client uses Amazon S3 for its hosting since it is just static content.

When you are ready to deploy a new version run these steps:

• middleman build - generates static assets that are uglified and minified to the build/ directory
• Copy the static assets in the build folder to the Amazon S3 Bucket
• If the build does not automatically create an updated env.js in build/, copy/patse env.js.example into build/ and change the name to env.js.

Documentation

You can generate the JS documentation using:

npm run doc:gen