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marmelab-boilerplate

A starter kit for new apps, based on:

• ES6 everywhere (with some bits of ES7, e.g. spread operator on objects)
• React.js, React Router, and Redux (for the frontend)
• Admin-on-rest (for the admin)
• Node.js, Koa.js and PostgreSQL (for the API server)
• Makefile, webpack and Mocha (for the build and test)

Features:

• Babel transpilation (es2015, react, stage-0) for both client and server code
• Node.js API built on top of Koa.js (successor of Express) for cleaner async code
• Automated CRUD resources based on a PostgreSQL database (using pg and co-postgres-queries)
• State-of the art robustness and security for the API (JWT, rate limiting, secure headers, based on helmet)
• Separated API for the admin, with different security settings (and login form)
• Built-in database migration handling (using db-migrate)
• Production-level logging (using winston)
• CORS support (including on IE8, thanks to xDomain)
• Fully automated start and stop (see Makefile)
• Auto-reload of Node.js code upon modification (using pm2)
• Frontend app built with React, redux, redux-saga, react-router, and redux-form
• Using react-dev-tools and hot reload for easier development
• SASS preprocessor (using node-sass)
• Including a non-trivial example with several routes, Ajax calls, and functional tests
• Fully automated build with webpack, including development (webpack-dev-server) and production target (minified)
• Admin app built with React.js and admin-on-rest
• Including a full-featured admin panel with references
• Unified test build, running unit and functional tests on all apps, powered by mocha and selenium
• AWS deployment automated by Fabric
• Sensible eslint defaults, based on Airbnb's rules

The boilerplate contains a sample app with three domains: users, products, and orders. Feel free to remove the corresponding files once you start implementing your own domain.

Install

Requirements:

• Node.js V5
• PostgreSQL
• openjdk-8-jre (to install selenium-standalone)

# install npm dependencies and Selenium (for tests)
make install

Tip: Add alias make='make -s' to your bash profile (bashrc, zshrc) for a better display.

Understand

The project directory structure is as follows:

bin/ # CLI tasks
build/ # compiled JS and CSS files for the admin and frontend app. The web root in production.
config/ # Project configuration
doc/
e2e/ # Functional tests
src/
  api/ # The server API code (Node.js, Koa.js)
  admin/ # The admin dashboard code (Angular.js, ng-admin)
  frontend/ # The frontend code (React.js, Redux)
  isomorphic/ # Code common to several apps
webpack/ # Webpack configuration (for admin and frontend compilation)

The entire code (api, admin, and frontend) is written in ES6 and transpiled to ES5 by babel.

Tip: In production, the compiled JS and CSS files (under build/) are served by the Node.js server. In development, it's done by webpack-dev-server.

The main entry point for understanding the code is probably src/api/index.js.

Project Configuration

This projects supports various runtime environments. This means that you can switch to an entirely different configuration based on the NODE_ENV environment variable:

# run the API server in development mode (default)
$ node ./src/api/index.js
# run the API server in test mode
$ NODE_ENV=test node ./src/api/index.js
# run the API server in production mode
$ NODE_ENV=production node ./src/api/index.js

Tip: On the production servers, you should set the NODE_ENV variable using supervisor.

It uses node-config to let you configure the project for the development, test, and production environments. node-config supports configuration cascade, so the actual configuration for a given environment is the combination of config/default.js and config/[NODE_ENV].js (the configuration settings for a given environment override the default settings).

Before running the app in development, you must copy the config/development-dist.js into config/development.js (this is done by the make install command), and edit the server and database settings to your development environment. Same for the test-dist.js if you intend to run unit tests.

Note: You need to remove all the demo code before to start your project. A pull request is in progress to do so, but this will take some time to finish it. Meanwhile, take a look on these folders to manually clean the code:

• src/api
• src/frontend
• src/admin
• src/api/e2e
• src/frontend/e2e

Develop

This project uses pm2 to manage its processes. Configuration files for pm2 can be found in the ./config/pm2_servers/ directory.

# start servers (node and webpack via pm2)
make run-dev
# both servers will run in the background
# the Node server uses nodemon and will restart on code change
# the frontend is served by webpack dev server with hot reload

# you can restart either the api or the frontend by hand
make restart-api
make restart-frontend

Browse the app:

• http://localhost:8081 for the admin app
• http://localhost:8080 for the frontend app
• http://localhost:3000 for the API

Tip: You can change the API port by running NODE_PORT=3001 make run-dev. Or, for persistent change, you can add this environment variable into the PM2 configuration file.

# stop servers (node and webpack)
make stop-dev

Test

# tests run in the "test" environment and don't empty the "development" database
make test

# alternatively, you can run any of the individual test suites:
make test-api-unit
make test-api-functional
make test-frontend-unit
make test-frontend-functional
make test-isomorphic-unit

API (and common lib) unit tests using:

• Mocha
• expect from expect

API functional tests using:

• Mocha
• expect from expect
• request

Frontend unit tests using:

• Mocha
• expect from expect
• Redux Thunk, redux-mock-store and nock to test redux action creators (as explain in redux documentation)
• enzyme to test react components

Frontend fonctional tests using:

• selenium-webdriver

Deployment

See deployment instructions.

Managing servers with PM2

dev and tests servers are managed with PM2. So, It's possible to :

# display the 'front dev' server's logs
make log-frontend-dev
# display the 'api dev' server's logs
make log-api-dev

# display the list of all servers
make servers-list
# display the monitoring for all servers
make servers-monitoring
# stop all servers
make servers-stop-all
# stop all servers, delete them, and clear their logs.
make servers-clear-all