Build A Vue Web App For Browsing, Searching And Viewing Catalyst

Catalyst | Vue WebApp

This is the repo for Not-Equal Catalyst’s frontend webapp. It is a Vue.js project written in JavaScript, pug and sass and deployed through Docker where it is served using express and vue-ssr.

What is Not-Equal Catalyst?

Development
- Setup
- Regular use
- Irregular use
- Code Structure
- Webpack build
- Code formatting
Deployment
- Building the image
- Using the image
- Environment variables
Future work

Development

Setup

To develop on this repo you will need to have Docker and node.js installed on your dev machine and have an understanding of them. This guide assumes you have the repo checked out and are on macOS, but equivalent commands are available. You will also need a Trello account which is used to pull the data from.

You’ll only need to follow this setup once for your dev machine.

# Install dependancies
npm install

# Setup your client environment
cp .env.example .env.local

# Follow these instructions to get your Trello credentials
open https://github.com/unplatform/catalyst-trello-scraper#setup

# Setup your server environment
cp .env.server.example .env.server.local

Regular use

These are the commands you’ll regularly run to develop the API, in no particular order.

# Start up a redis instance, fetch projects and serve them with the api
# -> Run this in a new terminal tab
# -> Stop this with a Ctrl+C
# -> See `docker-compose.yml` for how it works
docker-compuse up

# Compile and run the vue-cli-service's server
# -> Internally uses webpack to transpile assets to html, css & js
# -> Stop this with a Ctrl+C
# -> Only runs the client, no ssr yet
npm run serve
open http://localhost:8080

Irregular use

These are commands you might need to run but probably won’t, also in no particular order.

# Generate the table of contents for this readme
# -> It'll replace content between the toc-head and toc-tail HTML comments
npm run gen-readme-toc

# Manually lint code with TypeScript's `tsc`
npm run lint

# Manually format code
# -> This repo is setup to automatically format code on git-push
npm run prettier

# Manually build all assets (html, css, js & images)
# -> Runs both the other build commands together
# -> Writes to dist/
npm run build

# Manually build the assets for the client
npm run build:client

# Manually build the assets for the server (creates a vue-ssr-server-bundle-json)
npm run build:client

# Run the ssr server
# -> Requires .env.server.local to be setup
# -> Stop this with a Ctrl+C
# -> Just runs the server, no file watching or restarting
node server/index.js

Code Structure

Folder	Contents
dist	Where the html, css, js & img assets are built to
node_modules	Where npm’s modules get installed into
public	Unmodified assets, served directly to the client
server	The source code for the vue-ssr express server
src	The source code for the web app
src/assets	Image assets that are built into the app
src/components	Reusable Vue components
src/data	Static information for the web app
src/sass	Custom styles written in sass
src/views	The app’s views, components which are routed to

Webpack build

This repo uses vue-cli-service to handle most webpack configuration, including babel, post-css and processing .vue components. There are some tweaks to the defaults, these can be found in vue.config.js and are detailed below.

shared.sass is automatically imported for each Vue component’s <style> tags (with variables and mixins)
process.env.VUE_APP_VERSION is set to the package.json version
It adds vue-svg-loader
It sets up the required things for vue-ssr

Code formatting

This repo uses Prettier to automatically format code to a consistent standard. This works using the husky and lint-staged packages to automatically format code whenever you commit code. This means that code that is pushed to the repo is always formatted to a consistent standard.

You can manually run the formatter with npm run prettier if you want.

Prettier is slightly configured in .prettierrc.yml and also ignores files using .prettierignore.

Deployment

Building the image

This repo uses a GitLab CI to build a Docker image when you push a git tag. This is designed to be used with the npm version command so all docker images are semantically versioned. The :latest docker tag is not used.

This job runs using the .gitlab-ci.yml file which runs a docker build using the Dockerfile and only runs when you push a tag.

It pushes these docker images to the GitLab registry of the repo. A slight nuance is that it will replace a preceding v in tag names, formatting v1.0.0 to 1.0.0.

# Deploy a new version of the CLI
npm version # major | minor | patch
git push --tags
open https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/gitlab/catalyst/vue-webapp/pipelines

Using the image

With this docker image you can easily deploy and run the vue-ssr server using docker-compose. The express server runs on 8080 inside the container, so you’ll need to map that for external traffic.

Here’s an example with docker-compose:

For more info see catalyst-example-stack

version: '3'

services:
  web-ui:
    image: openlab.ncl.ac.uk:4567/catalyst/vue-webapp:0.1.0
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    environment:
      PUBLIC_URL: https://catalyst.not-equal.tech
      API_URL: https://api.catalyst.not-equal.tech
      REDIS_URL: redis://your_redis_url

Environment variables

There are some required environment variables, shown below.

Variable	Description
REDIS_URL	The redis connection uri
PUBLIC_URL	Where the app is, used for generating opengraph meta
API_URL	Where the api is, passed into the webapp through vuex

There are some optional variables too:

Variable	Description
APP_NAME	Set the app’s name, used in opengraph
APP_INFO	Set the app’s description, used in opengraph
TWITTER_HANDLE	The twitter handle of the project (used in opengraph)

There are files you can override with bind-mounts

Path	File
`/app/public/favicon.png`	The site’s favicon
`/app/public/opengraph.png`	The site’s opengraph image e.g. for tweets
`/app/public/categories/*`	Custom category images

Trello key-values

Key	Usage
`home.title`	The title on the homepage, shown after the hero
`home.strapline`	The strapline on the homepage, in the hero
`home.searchLabel`	The label next to the search field
`home.noMatches`	A label when filtering returns no responses
`home.noResponses`	A label when there are no responses at all
`about.title`	The title of the about page
`about.subtitle`	The subtitle of the about page
`about.long`	The content of the about page
`about.short`	The info displayed next to a project detail
`notFound.title`	The title of the not found page
`notFound.message`	The message of the not found page