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Webri.ng

This repository contains the source for the webri.ng website, and its supporting database. The website's front, and back-end are both contained within this repository.

Site

The src/site directory contains the source code for the main server. All source code is written in Typescript. Pug is used for rendering the front-end pages. Database connectivity is implemented using the pg module with TypeORM as an ORM to interface with a PostgreSQL database. Testing is implemented using Mocha and Chai.

Source tree

The source tree is split into several main directories:

  • server/api: Contains the code for the main server API, as well as request validation schemas.
  • server/app: Contains the service layer, which contains the main business logic.
  • server/config: Contains the various environment configurations for the server. A default base config file is overwritten with enviroment-specific configurations based upon the current runtime environment.
  • server/model: Contains all domain model types.
  • server/infra: Contains all of the code for interfacing with external infrastructure, such as the database, and email.

Refer to styleguide.md for development practices. The main entry point for the built application is src/site/dist/index.js.

Local development

Before you can bootstrap the server locally, you will need to run the local mock services and initialise the database. The database schema, and application user can be created using the src/db/setup script.

Setup dependencies

In order to run the server setup locally you will need the following applications installed:

  • psql: Postgres front-end. Binaries are available from most Linux distro repositories or from the official site.

First-time configuration

In order to setup the application for local development:

  • Initialise local development mock services by running the docker-compose.yml file in the main /src directory.
  • Initialise the database schema, application's database credentials and seed data by running the npm run start:initdb script. This is a shorthand for running the setup script in the src/db directory. This will initialise the database schema, and set up the application user.
  • From here you should be able to run the server locally using npm run start:dev. Refer to src/site/package.json for more specific NPM configuration.

Environment Variables

Provided below is a table of the environment variables which can be used to configure the application. These are necessary for running a staging/production instance of the application. All required env vars are provided in the default development environment config. For more details refer to modules in the src/site/config directory.

Key Description
PORT The HTTP port to run the site's server on
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_NAME An arbitrary name to identify the email transport
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_HOST The host of the email transport provider
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_PORT The port of the email transport provider
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_AUTH_USER The user account to authenticate with the email transport provider
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_AUTH_PASS The password to authenticate with the email transport provider
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_SECURE Whether TLS should be used for the SMTP connection
EMAIL_TRANSPORT_IGNORE_TLS Whether TLS validation should be ignored for the SMTP connection
DB_SCHEMA The Postgres database schema to use
DB_HOST The database hostname
DB_PORT The database port
DB_USER The database username to authenticate with
DB_PASS The database password to authenticate with
DB_NAME The name of the Postgres database to use
DB_SSL Whether to use SSL when connecting to the database

First steps

If you are new to the codebase, the best way to approach debugging any particular issue or understanding any one particular aspect is to trace the flow of control through the application. Most functionality within the application is API driven and begins with a HTTP request to the application's main router. The best place to begin looking is the main express.js router module, located at src/site/api/index.ts. Within this file are declarations for the individual sub-routers for all of the application's exposed APIs. Each API typically exposes two routers: The API, and View routers. The API router implements the application's REST API, and the View router implements the front-end views. For example:

// ...
// `api/user/index.ts`.
userApiRouter.post('/register',
	validateRequestBody(registrationRequestSchema),
	registerController);

// ...

Inside this API route module we can see that the main functionality is contained within the userService module, contained within the service layer:

// ...
// `api/user/register.ts`
	const { username, email, password } = req.body;

	/** The newly created user entity. */
	const user: User | null = await userService.register(username, email, password);
// ...

The main application logic is contained within the 'services' exposed from the src/app module. The individual 'service' submodules contained within this module expose the core of the application's functionality, separated into logical groupings.