Depricated. New website is found at https://sites.wustl.edu/snhc/.

snhc-web: the SNHC web front-end

Our public-facing website. Seeded using the angular-seed repository.

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone our repository and install the dependencies. Alternatively, for small changes (particularly if it only involves wordsmithing and no substantial formatting changes), you can edit directly through GitHub. See "Editing on GitHub" for details. The rest of this section deals with hacking on this repo locally, which is nothing but encouraged!

Editing on GitHub

There are a couple of ways to edit our website. The first, and easiest, is simply to make changes using the GitHub web GUI. Doing this prevents you from being able to test your changes, so do not make your changes in master unless you are sure you're not breaking anything. Instead, make them in a branch, and then ask the webmaster to test your branch before merging.

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the our repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.

We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize run our site. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.

Clone snhc-web

Clone us with:

git clone https://github.com/justinrporter/snhc-web.git
cd snhc-web

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

• We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the node package manager.
• We get the angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/bower_components - contains the angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but snhc-web changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a webserver.

Run the Application

We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:

npm start

Now browse to the app at http://localhost:8000/app/index.html.

Testing

There are two kinds of tests in the snhc-web application: Unit tests and End to End tests.

They're copied from the angular-seed app, and don't work right now. The rest of this section is copypasta.

Running Unit Tests

The angular-seed app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in Jasmine, which we run with the Karma Test Runner. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.

• the configuration is found at karma.conf.js
• the unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and are named as ..._test.js.

The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:

npm test

This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.

You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:

npm run test-single-run

End to end testing

The angular-seed app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.

• the configuration is found at e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js
• the end-to-end tests are found in e2e-tests/scenarios.js

Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.

npm start

In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver we need to install this. The angular-seed project comes with a predefined script to do this:

npm run update-webdriver

This will download and install the latest version of the stand-alone WebDriver tool.

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running and WebDriver is updated, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:

npm run protractor

This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.

Updating Angular

The angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower), so you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.

You can update the tool dependencies by running:

npm update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

You can update the Angular dependencies by running:

bower update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.

Loading Angular Asynchronously

The angular-seed project supports loading the framework and application scripts asynchronously. The special index-async.html is designed to support this style of loading. For it to work you must inject a piece of Angular JavaScript into the HTML page. The project has a predefined script to help do this.

npm run update-index-async

This will copy the contents of the angular-loader.js library file into the index-async.html page. You can run this every time you update the version of Angular that you are using.

Serving the Application Files

While angular is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create angular webapps that don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local webserver during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, xhr, etc to function properly when an html page is opened via file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The snhc-web project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js tool called http-server. You can start this webserver with npm start but you may choose to install the tool globally:

sudo npm install -g http-server

Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:

http-server -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own webserver, such as apache or nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.

Running the App in Production

Every night, the student groups server, run by IT will pull down and deploy the master branch from GitHub. That means that any changes merged to master will go live at midnight after the change is merged.

Curretly, there is no backend code for this portion of the website. Given the state of those servers, and our control over their configuration, this is unlikely to change in the near future, unless we migrate to another hosting solution.

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