UI

UI is a graphical user interface for Tendrl, a modern, extensible web-based storage management platform, using RESTFul API to communicate with Tendrl API server.

UI: Development

UI is a static webapp, built from a Node.js project. This document details how to contribute to the project as a developer.

Prerequisites

Required skills/expertise

Experience of webapplication development
Understanding of JavaScript, CSS, HTML
Familiarity with Node.js & npm
Familiarity with angularjs

Setting up workstation

Make sure you have git, nodejs, npm installed in your system, along with your favorite code-editor & browser with devtools (latest Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome recommended).

Follow your platform's own process to set these up. On a Fedora PC, you'll use

$ sudo dnf install -y git nodejs npm

Obtaining the source

Fork the upstream repo to your own GitHub account.

This is required.

You will be working/making changes on your own repo, and create pull requests to submit changes to the upstream. Upon peer-review, those changes will be merged, if everything went well. You should never directly push to the upstream, even if you have write access.

Once forked, you can clone the repo to your workstation for development:

$ git clone git@github.com:GitHubUsername/ui.git
$ cd ui

Reaching out

To communicate with the existing developers, ask for help/clarifications etc. send an email to tendrl-devel@redhat.com prepending [Frontend] in the subject line. This is the mailing list for Tendrl developers, and to be in the loop you should subscribe here: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/tendrl-devel.

Contributing

Coding guidelines

Follow standard frontend development best practices to work on the code.Consult this and this consolidated guides for further details.

In case of confusion or conflict of opinions, please create an issue to start the discussion.

Building from source

Within the git cloned source directory, run the following commands to build the app. You should be able to build from the source successfully before making any changes to the source.

$ sudo npm install -g gulp
$ npm install
$ gulp

Upon success of all the steps, you should have the build artifacts in ./dist/ subdirectory.

You can also run gulp dev command. It will add watchers to all files and accordingly dist folder will be updated continuosly.

Running a dev-server

To run and test the build locally, you can use various static file server over HTTP. We recommend using http-server module, however, httpd/nginx etc can as well be used.

$ npm install -g http-server
$ cd dist
$ http-server # starts the web-server with doc-root as `pwd`

The advantage of using http-server module is that, it's easy to use it with another existing server which can handle the request, which the test server is incapable of serving.

$ http-server -P http://production.server/

You should be able to browse the app, running on test server by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8080 from your browser.

Making changes

Make sure to pull from upstream/master before starting to work on something
Preferably create a branch, after the pull to work on a specific issue
Fix one thing per commit - neither more, nor less
Fixing an issue may require a bunch of commits - that's okay
Give meaningful commit messages, if necessary add descriptions
Signing off code isn't mandatory but is recommended
Do not introduce different line-ending conventions in your code (especially if using non-*nix systems)
Comment/document your code in a way, any new contributor can understand the concept behind the implementation
Make sure to write tests for the feature you add
Make sure not to break tests of other features while working on one

Submitting pull requests

Once you've successfully made some changes, built, ran, tested and pushed to your GitHub remote - then you should submit a pull request for the changes to be applied on the upstream repo.

Use GitHub's interface to create new pull requests. Once submitted, the code will go through some automated tests, integration and peer-reviews.

You might be asked for clarification or requested to update your code depending on the review. You can append new commits to fix those nits on the same branch of your repo, and the pull request should be automatically updated to reflect those changes.

Once approved, your code will be merged with the upstream.

Rejoice!

Next steps

If you enjoyed contributing to UI, pick up another issue. If you need help, reach out to us on mailing list. If you've successfully submitted a few changes, feel free to ask to be a member of the GitHub org.

May the source be with you.

UI: Deployment

UI is a static webapp, built from a Node.js project. This document details how to build from the source, and then how to configure the webhost to serve the app.

Basic Requirements

Minimum System Requirements

This is the bare minimal requirements for a VM to be able to run the Tendrl frontend server. However, for performance and efficiency, more resources would be good to avail:

CPU: 1 core, 1 thread
RAM: 512 MiB
Storage: 10GiB
OS: RHEL 7.x or similar

Package dependencies

httpd or, nginx

Build dependencies

Only required if building from source:

Installed with distro's package manager: git, nodejs, npm + Installed with npm: gulp,

How to Deploy

To deploy UI, you may want to build from source, or install the package.

If installing from package, skip the "Building from source" section
If building from source, likewise, skip "Installing from repo" section

TIP: This entire process should be handled by a bootstrapping script in future.

NOTE: The commands listed here assumes latest version of Fedora in use as the host OS, use proper substitution if your environment differ.

Step 1: Preparing host

If you're on Fedora

Nothing to do here, jump to next step.

If you're on RHEL

You need to register and activate your subscription with customer portal ID to add repos and install packages. @TODO: process details & guides.

If you're on CentOS

You need to enable EPEL repo with yum install epel-release

If you're on Other Distro

Follow along the next steps, and depending on distros, some processes, commands and package names may vary.

Step 2: Building from source

First we need the essential packages

$ sudo dnf install -y git nodejs npm

Then we need the frontend source

$ git clone https://github.com/Tendrl/ui.git
$ cd ui

Next we will install the dependencies for the package to build

$ sudo npm install -g gulp
$ npm install

Lastly, the build... which is an one step process, using gulp to automate the underlying steps

$ gulp

Once gulp finishes compiling, the build artifacts will be available in the dist subdirectory within the source path.

Step 3: Installing from repo

@TODO: content to be added when package details are available.

Step 4: Serving the application

In this step, we take the build artifacts and serve them as web contents.

@TODO: if installed from package, depending on which all steps are covered in the process, this section might need updating.

Configure firewall

For the server to be able to accept and serve external http requests, we need to configure the firewall.

This isn't required to be the first step (and can be done after installing the webserver), however, this is a common step for whatever webserver we choose to go with up next.

$ sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
$ sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Serve using nginx

First, let's install and start nginx

$ sudo dnf install -y nginx
$ sudo systemctl start nginx

At this point, you should be able to see the default nginx webpage, by visiting http://<hostname.or.ip.address>/ from your browser.

Now, to serve the app content (instead of the default page) you can take either of the 2 following ways (among many other possible, less desirable ways):

. Easy way: copy over app contents to nginx's default webroot .. Backup the default pages: $ sudo mv /usr/share/nginx/html /usr/share/nginx/default .. Copy over the app contents: $ cp -r <source-path>/dist /usr/share/nginx/html . Right way: follow along nginx's official documentation on how to configure the server for serving static webapp.

Serve using httpd

Again, let's install and start Apache first

$ sudo dnf install -y httpd
$ sudo systemctl start httpd

At this point, you should be able to see the default httpd webpage, by visiting http://<hostname.or.ip.address>/ from your browser.