Visible Thoughts Writer

Setup

Firebase project

Create a project on Firebase and enable the following modules: Authentication, Firestore, Hosting and Functions.

Email notifications

For sending notification emails, the application needs an SMTP relay service such as SendGrid:

• Create a free account on SendGrid
• Create an API key for SMTP relay
• Install the Trigger Email extension in your Firebase project and configure it with the SendGrid API key.
• Rename extensions/firestore-send-email.env.template into extensions/firestore-send-email.env.template and edit it to change <your_name>, <your_email_address> and <your_api_key> with your SendGrid API key.

Algolia search

For search capabilities, the application uses Algolia:

• Create a free account on Algolia.
• Create an application
• Create two indexes named, prod_steps and prod_runs
• Inside the prod_runs index, create replicas title_asc, title_desc, status_asc and status_desc
• Import the configuration for each of these indexes and replicas, using the provided algolia-*.json files
• Rename extensions/firestore-algolia-search.env.template into extensions/firestore-algolia-search.env and fill in the missing info (see this for more explanations)
• Install the Firestore Algolia Search extension in your Firebase project and configure it with the settings from extensions/firestore-algolia-search.env
• Rename extensions/firestore-algolia-search-runs.env.template into extensions/firestore-algolia-search-runs.env and fill in the missing info
• Install the Firestore Algolia Search extension again, this time with the name firestore-algolia-search-runs, and use the settings from extensions/firestore-algolia-search-runs.env

Local setup

Rename src/firebase.creds.json.temp into src/firebase.creds.json and edit it with the credential from the Firebase project.

Rename src/conf.json.temp into src/conf.json and fill in the required info.

Connect to your Firebase project:

npm install -g firebase-tools
firebase login

Install project dependencies:

npm install

Using emulators (optional)

To make some local tests without interacting with the production environment, you can run emulators for all the Firebase services (except Hosting).

Optional: to have Cloud functions working, you need to set up the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, see here. Otherwise, it will call the production environment.

Run the following command to start the emulators:

firebase emulators:start

Edit src/conf.json to set useEmulators to true, for the React app to use them.

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Then, see below to run the React app either in development or production mode.

Run development version locally

npm run start to run the app in the development mode.\ Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in your browser.

To populate the database with random data:

npx tsx scripts/populate.ts

For unit testing, run npm run test.

Run production build locally

npm install -g serve
npm run build && serve -s build

Deploy to hosting service

npm run build && firebase deploy