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https://elemental-automata.herokuapp.com/

Need We Address

Need in the gaming community for online elemental automata with community sharing functionality.

Project Top-level

This repository combines the client and server into a single repository that can be co-developed, tested and ultimately deployed to Heroku.

The client was created with create-react-app (CRA) and the server is a separate Node.js application. The client-server integration is based on this tutorial and repository. This repository will be referred to as the "top-level" to distinguish it from the client and server.

Final Checkpoint

The following instructions are intended to allow this project to be easily shared, extended, and maintained by future developers. The first step in the process is to clone or download this repository.

Installing (and Adding) Dependencies

The app is structured as three separate packages. That is a "top-level" package and a separate "client" and "server". Thus initially installing dependencies is a 3 step process that runs "install" for each of the packages.

npm install
npm install --prefix client
npm install --prefix server

The --prefix option treats the supplied path as the package root. In this case it is equivalent to cd client then npm install then cd ...

You will typically not need to install any dependencies in the top-level package.json file. Doing so is a common mistake. Most dependencies are needed by the client or the server and should be installed in the respective sub-packages, e.g. to install reactstrap for your client application:

npm install --save reactstrap --prefix client

Running the Application

The combined application, client and server, can be run with npm start in the top-level directory. npm start launches the CRA development server on http://localhost:3000 and the backend server on http://localhost:3001. By setting the proxy field in the client package.json, the client development server will proxy any unrecognized requests to the server. By default this starts the server in hot-reloading mode (like with the client application).

Testing

The client application can be independently tested as described in the CRA documentation, i.e.:

npm test --prefix client

The server can be similarly independently tested:

npm test --prefix server

Linting

Both the client and server can be independently linted via:

npm run lint --prefix client

and

npm run lint --prefix server

To ensure consistent style we use the CRA-recommended Prettier package. We installed it in the "top-level" package with

npm install --save-dev husky lint-staged prettier

and added the recommended configuration to automatically reformat code during the commit. That is whenever you commit your code, Prettier will automatically reformat your code during the commit process (as a "hook"). The hook is specified in the top-level package.json file. The client and server has its own ESLint configuration.

We added custom ESLint rules to capture common errors. To ensure compatibility with Prettier, we also installed the eslint-config-prettier package in both the client and server to disable styling rules that conflict with Prettier.

npm install --save-dev eslint-config-prettier --prefix server
npm install --save-dev eslint-config-prettier --prefix client

and added an "extends" entry to .eslintrc.json.

Continuous Integration

The skeleton is setup for CI with Travis-CI. Travis will build the client and test and lint both the client and the server.

Deploying to Heroku

Your application can be deployed to Heroku using the approach demonstrated in this repository. The key additions to the top-level package.json file to enable Heroku deployment:

• Specify the node version in the engines field
• Add a heroku-postbuild script field that will install dependencies for the client and server and create the production build of the client application.
• Specify that node_modules should be cached to optimize build time

In addition a Procfile was added in the top-level package to start the server.

Assuming that you have a Heroku account, have installed the Heroku command line tools and committed any changes to the application, to deploy to Heroku:

1. Create the Heroku app, e.g.:

   heroku apps:create
   

2. Push to Heroku

   git push heroku master
   

To set up the RDBMS database on Heroku, please follow these steps:

1. Set up the database schema with Knex:

   heroku run 'cd server && npx knex migrate:latest'
   

2. Seed the database with the default scenarios:

   heroku run 'cd server && npx knex seed:run'