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Oxide Web Console

Web client to the Oxide API.

screenshot of instances list page

Live demo

At https://console-preview.oxide.computer, the console is deployed as a static site with a mock API running in a Service Worker. You can create mock resources and they will persist across client-side navigations, but they exist only in the browser: nobody else can see them and the mock "DB" is reset on pageload. Request and response bodies in the mock API match the Oxide API's OpenAPI spec, but behavior is only mocked in as much detail as is required for development and testing of the console and is not fully representative of the real API.

Goals and principles

  • The console is not an application, it is a client to the application (the Oxide API) — minimize client-side state
  • Be a transparent view onto the API — teach API concepts and avoid making the user learn anything console-specific
  • Simple, predictable, and broadly functional everywhere is better than deeply polished in a few places
  • When we don't have product clarity, build the simplest thing and move on
  • There is enough technical risk elsewhere down the stack, so be conservative:
    • Focus on building things we can be sure we'll need
    • Rely on good libraries that we can use the way they want to be used
    • Building on bad abstractions is costly — duplication is fine while you figure out the right abstraction
  • Linkability — use routes to capture app state
  • Rely on code generated from API spec for correctness

Architecture

console client-server architecture diagram

In order to avoid the complexity of server-side rendering (and running JS on the rack), the web console is a fully client-side React app. We use Vite (which uses Rollup internally for production builds) to build a set of assets (index.html, JS bundles, CSS, fonts, images) and we serve those assets as static files from a special set of console endpoints in Nexus. From the control plane API server's point of view, the web console simply is:

  • a directory of static assets and some endpoints that serve them
  • a few other endpoints to handle auth actions like login/logout
  • a table of sessions (console-specific in practice, but not intrinsically so)

The web console has no special privileges as an API consumer. Logging in sets a cookie, and we make cookie-authed API requests after that. See RFD 223 Web Console Architecture (internal document for now) for a more detailed discussion. The endpoints live in nexus/src/external_api/console_api.rs in Omicron.

Tech

Directory structure

The app is in app. You can see the route structure in app/routes.tsx. Also in app we have a ui dir where the low-level components live and an api dir where we keep the generated API client and a React Query wrapper for it. The latter is aliased in tsconfig.json for easy import from the main app as @oxide/api.

Development

Node.js version

Use Node.js v18+.

Install dependencies

npm install
npx playwright install # only needed to run e2e tests

Run Vite dev server + MSW mock API

This is the way we do most console development. Just run:

npm run dev

and navigate to http://localhost:4000 in the browser. The running app will automatically update when you write a source file. This mode uses Mock Service Worker to run a mock API right the browser. This mock API is also used in tests.

Specifying non-default user

Pick a user from the list of users in mock-api/user.ts. The one without fleet viewer permissions is Hans Jonas. Open the browser console and run:

document.cookie = 'msw-user=Hans Jonas;domain=localhost;path=/'

You are now user Hans Jonas. To go back to the default, delete the cookie. (We will get the mock API to clear the cookie for you on logout soon.)

Run Vite dev server against local Nexus API

You can also run the console dev server locally with the mock server off, instead passing requests through to localhost:12220. Run npm run start:nexus and navigate to http://localhost:4000/login/test-suite-silo/local in the browser. It will not work unless Nexus is running at localhost:12220, which is the default for omicron-dev (see Running Omicron (Simulated) for how to set that up).

One way to run everything is to use the tools/start_api.sh script, which uses tmux to run multiple processes in different panes and automatically populates some fake data (see tools/populate_omicron_data.sh to see exactly what). From the omicron directory, run tools/start_api.sh. Since we're assuming console and omicron are next to each other, that looks like this:

../console/tools/start_api.sh

Run local dev server against the dogfood rack

  1. Get on the VPN
  2. Run npm run start:dogfood
  3. Go to https://localhost:4000 (note the https). The page won't work yet, and you'll get redirected to /login, which will look like a 404
  4. Go to https://oxide.sys.rack2.eng.oxide.computer in another tab and log in
  5. Open the dev tools Storage tab and copy the session cookie value, which should look like d9b1a96e151092eb0ea08b1a0d8c4788441f1894
  6. Go back to your localhost tab, open the developer console, and run
document.cookie = 'session=d9b1a96e151092eb0ea08b1a0d8c4788441f1894;domain=localhost;path=/'

Go to https://localhost:4000 again and you should be logged in.

E2E tests with Playwright

Playwright tests live in test/e2e. npm run e2e runs the tests in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but this is rarely necessary in local dev. npm run e2ec is a shortcut for playwright test --project=chrome, which runs the tests in Chrome only (the fastest one, useful for local dev). Playwright has an excellent UI mode for running and debugging tests that you can get to by running npm run e2e -- --ui.

To debug end-to-end failures on CI, check out the branch with the failure and run ./tools/debug-ci-e2e-fail.sh. It'll download the latest failures from CI and allow you to open a playwright trace of the failure.

Summary of useful commands

Command Description
npm run dev Run Vite dev server with mock API
npm test Vitest unit tests
npm run e2ec Run Playwright E2E tests in Chrome only
npm run lint ESLint
npx tsc Check types
npm run ci Lint, tests (unit and e2e), and types
npm run fmt Format everything. Rarely necessary thanks to editor integration
npm run gen-api Generate API client (see docs/update-pinned-api.md)
npm run start:mock-api Serve mock API on port 12220

Relevant RFDs