Support Dotcom Components

A Node.js server for serving marketing messages to theguardian.com (dotcom-rendering).

Configuration of the marketing messages is primarily done from the RRCP.

See architecture for details.

Development

This project uses nvm. You should run nvm use in your terminal before running any of the following commands. To set up, first run

yarn

This will install all the project dependencies.

Server

To start the server run

yarn start

This will start webpack in watch mode to recompile on file changes and nodemon to run the resulting javascript and restart after recompilation.

The server runs on port 8082 locally.

DCR

A local instance of DCR will use the SDC_URL environment variable to get the url for requests to SDC. To point DCR at a local instance of SDC we can therefore run DCR like

SDC_URL=http://localhost:8082 make dev

Browserstack Local:

If you need to test against local instances of SDC + DCR through Browserstack Local then it's necessary to use the thegulocal.com domain. To do this, in SDC:

1. setup nginx with packages/server/scripts/nginx/setup.sh
2. run base_url=https://contributions.thegulocal.com yarn server start

Then in DCR:

1. setup nginx with scripts/nginx/setup.sh
2. run SDC_URL=https://contributions.thegulocal.com make dev
3. use https://r.thegulocal.com, rather than localhost

Run the tests

To run the tests run

yarn test

To run specific tests specify the path, e.g.

yarn test src/server/tests/banners/bannerDeploySchedule.test.ts

Project structure

The /src directory contains 3 subdirectories:

• /server - a Node.js express server.
• /dotcom - exports selected code/types for publishing to an npm package, for use by dotcom-rendering.
• /shared - shared code between /server and /dotcom.

Publishing to npm

@guardian/support-dotcom-components is a library for sharing logic and types with dotcom-rendering.

Releasing to NPM is handled with changesets and is performed by CI.

On your feature branch, before merging, run yarn dotcom changeset from the root of the project. This will interactively ask you what kind of change this is (major, minor, patch) and allow you to describe the change. Commit the generated changeset file to git and push to your branch.

When you merge the branch, a version release PR will be automatically opened.

When this PR is merged, a new release will be pushed to NPM. The version change will be based on the information in your changeset file. If the version release PR isn't merged straight away, that's fine. Any other PRs with changesets merged in the meantime will cause the release PR to be updated.

Not all PRs require releasing and therefore don't need a changeset. For example a change to the README.

Updating in DCR

You can manually bump the version of SDC in package.json and run pnpm i, or run

pnpm --filter=@guardian/dotcom-rendering i @guardian/support-dotcom-components@latest

from the root of the project.

SSH access

To ssh onto an instance use: ssm ssh --profile <aws profile> -x --ssm-tunnel -i <instance ID>

Logging

When running locally a simple console.log is all you need. However, if you want to produce logs that can be viewed in kibana the simplest way to go is to use the logInfo/logWarn/logError functions exported from logging.ts. These take a message string that you can search for under the message field in kibana. If you want additional flexibility, you can use the logger.info/logger.warn/logger.error methods on the exported logger object instead. These methods take an object with any key/values that will appear as top level keys in kibana. However, getting the types wrong (e.g if you did logger.info({ message: ["foo", "bar"]})) would result in kibana silently rejecting the log and it therefore not being searchable (as message must be a string).