ShelterTech Web App

Sauce Labs Browser Test Status

Onboarding Instructions

Dev Role Description

Technical Onboarding & Team Guidelines

Docker-based Development Environment (Recommended)

Requirements

Docker Community Edition (CE) >= 17.06 Docker Compose >= 1.18

Follow the Docker installation instructions for your OS.

Set up the project

This is not a full guide to Docker and Docker Compose, so please consult other guides to learn more about those tools.

The docker-compose.yml is configured to mount the git repo on your host filesystem into the Docker container so that any changes you make on your host machine will be synced into the container and vice versa.

Creating the config.yml file

All config should be added in a file called config.yml. A sample config.example.yml is provided, you need to copy it and edit any parts that ask you to enter in your own information.

$ cp config.example.yml config.yml

# Open it in your preferred text editor

Algolia

Algolia is used as our search engine and in order for it to operate properly for everyone, we each need our own index.

• in config.yml set your github username as the value for ALGOLIA_INDEX_PREFIX. This will point to the search index matching your local environment.

Building and running the application

# Install node dependencies
$ docker compose run --rm web npm install

# Build static assets bundle
$ docker compose run --rm web npm run build

# Run dev server
$ docker compose up

You should be able to view the web app in your browser at http://localhost:8080.

By default, this assumes that you have also set up askdarcel-api project using the Docker setup instructions and that the API server is running. If you want to target a different instance of askdarcel-api, you can modify the API_URL environment variable in docker-compose.yml.

Fully tearing down environment

In case you ever need to fully tear down your local development environment, such as to do a fresh setup from a clean slate, you will need to run extra commands to remove state that is stored in Docker. Removing the git repository and re-cloning is insufficient because some of the state is stored in Docker.

In particular, for performance reasons, we save NPM modules in a node_modules/ directory that is mounted from a Docker volume rather than bind mounting the node_modules/ directory from the host operating system (e.g. macOS). To delete all the installed NPM modules, you will have to remove the Docker volume.

The following command will stop all running Docker containers, delete them, and remove their volumes:

$ docker compose down --remove-orphans --volumes

Note: When you run that command, you may get an error message about removing networks:

ERROR: error while removing network: network askdarcel id
4c4713d7f42173843437de3b0051a9d7e7bc81eb18123993975c3cd5a9e0a38e has active
endpoints

If this happens, then you need to run docker compose stop in the askdarcel-api application first before running the docker compose down command above.

Non-Docker Development Environment

Installing Node.js and npm

We recommend using nvm (Node Version Manager) or Docker to ensure that the versions of Node.js and npm are the same across development, Travis CI, staging, and production environments.

After installing nvm, to install both Node.js and npm run from the top of the git repo:

$ nvm install  # Reads from .nvmrc

Installing npm dependencies

To install the dependencies, from the top directory run

npm install

To build the bundled script with webpack run

npm run build

And to run the dev server, run

npm run dev

End to end testing

Quick summary of what TestCafe is and how it works

It's a framework for running end-to-end tests (read: real browser tests) that injects your tests onto an existing web page. Architecturally, they spin up a lightweight proxy server that wraps your web page, and when you connect a browser to the proxy server, it serves the requested page with the test driver injected into it.

It's essentially an alternative to writing Selenium tests, and I've found it nice to use because it mimics many of the common HTML5 DOM APIs and because they've added a lot of reasonable default behavior that Selenium lacks, such as properly waiting for events to finish running and for elements to appear before running your assertions.

How to run

If you are not using Docker and all the services are bound to localhost, then you should just be able to run:

$ npm run testcafe -- --skip-js-errors chrome testcafe/*.js

Note: Make sure you have the dev server running (npm run dev) before you try running the above

If you are using Docker, then you'll need to run it somewhat like this:

$ docker compose run --rm -p 1337:1337 -e BASE_URL=http://web:8080 web npm run testcafe -- --skip-js-errors remote --skip-js-errors --hostname localhost --ports 1337,1338 ./testcafe/

This will spin up a web server at http://localhost:1337/ and print out a URL to use. You should manually enter it into your browser to start the tests.