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Welcome to Toolbox

Toolbox is an application designed to showcase Hoist, Extremely Heavy's full-stack UI toolkit.

Toolbox consists of both a desktop and mobile app with examples of all Hoist Components, their usage, and links to related Hoist and Toolbox source code. Toolbox also provides several application examples which may be especially useful as a starting point for application developers new to the framework.

Please refer to the Hoist Core and Hoist React repos for detailed information and documentation on Hoist, including more information on configuring a local development environment.

Toolbox is itself a Hoist Application, and we keep it updated with the latest versions of the Hoist Framework. A toolbox-dev instance is auto-deployed via Teamcity on each commit to either the Toolbox or Hoist develop branches. We update a distinct "production" instance manually with each new versioned Hoist release.

Database

Toolbox uses MySQL for its configuration database. Note this is not a common choice for Hoist applications, which typically use whatever enterprise database is already in place within a client's infrastructure, but it provides a common and easy-to-run DB for local development and our AWS-based deployments.

  • For initial/test usage, Toolbox is can run with a transient in-memory database (H2) that will be rebuilt at startup of the app. This is enabled via the useH2 instance configuration (see below).
  • For persistent deployments, Toolbox is designed to work with MySQL. If you don't already have it installed and are on a Mac, we recommend installing via Homebrew with brew install mysql.
  • Create a new empty database named toolbox, being sure to use a UTF8 charset (fortunately this is the default for newer versions of MySQL). Alternatively, use an export of the deployed toolbox DB with CREATE DATABASE included (Anselm can provide).
  • For local development, use of the root account is fine, or (better) you can create a local user and password dedicated to Toolbox. If using a non-root account, ensure that the user has DBO rights on the new database. Database credentials are provided to the app via instance configuration (see below).
  • If the server is started against an empty database, Grails will auto-create the required schemas on first run as long as a suitable value is provided for the dbCreate data source parameter. See the DBConfig class for where this is set - we leave toolbox on update to allow for automatic schema changes as needed.

Instance Configuration

Hoist applications require low-level "instance configuration" properties to provide settings such as database credentials and other environment-specific settings that should not be checked into source control. These properties can be set in one of two primary ways: a YAML file on the local filesystem, or environment variables.

Toolbox is configured to source these properties from environment variables, and uses a Gradle plugin to read them from a .env file in the project root. That file should never be pushed to git (it's listed in .gitignore accordingly), but an .env.template file is checked-in to enumerate required and optional properties.

Copy .env.template to .env and fill in the required values for your local database connection.

Authentication

Note that Toolbox uses 'Auth0' as its authentication provider, and includes various client-side and server side adaptors for that. Typical Hoist applications will use an enterprise-specific Single Sign-On (SSO) such as JESPA/NTLM, kerberos, or another OAuth based solution.

When adding a new top-level entry-point for Toolbox (such as a new example application), the desired URL must be registered with Auth0 as a valid OAuth callback URL. Either Lee or Anselm can update our Auth0 config accordingly.

Wrapper project for Toolbox + Hoist development

A special project / directory structure can be useful for developing Toolbox alongside the Hoist Core and React libraries, so that changes to the libraries themselves can be developed and tested locally using Toolbox as a reference app. This is the recommended configuration for XH developers to use when setting up Toolbox.

  • Create a new directory within your homedir or another suitable location - name it something like toolbox-wrapper.
  • Within this new parent directory, check out the toolbox, hoist-react, and hoist-core repositories as siblings.
  • Create a new settings.gradle file within the top-level directory. The contents of this file will be a single line: include "toolbox", "hoist-core". This tells Gradle to reference and combine the build.gradle targets of those two sub-projects into a single umbrella project.
  • Create a new build.gradle file within the top-level directory. This is required to support the co.uzzu.dotenv plugin used by Toolbox to read environment variables - the plugin must be applied to the root project, which is the top-level wrapper directory in this mode. The Toolbox build.gradle file is where the plugin is actually applied, but for that to work in wrapper mode the plugin must be defined within the root (wrapper) project also, requiring a build file. Its contents should be: 
    buildscript {
    repositories {
        gradlePluginPortal()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath "co.uzzu.dotenv:gradle:4.0.0" // keep in sync with version in Toolbox build.gradle
    }
}
  • From the checked-out toolbox sub-directory, copy the gradle directory and the gradlew (or gradlew.bat if on Windows) wrapper script and paste the copies into the top-level wrapper directory.
    • Your top-level directory should now contain four sub-directories, settings.gradle, build.gradle, and the gradlew script.
  • From the top-level directory, run ./gradlew to ensure that Gradle can properly configure the unified build.
  • If using IntelliJ, create a new project by running through the "New project from existing sources..." workflow and pointing the IDE at the top-level settings.gradle file.
    • IntelliJ should detect that this is a Gradle/Grails project, download and index the server-side dependencies, and set up an appropriate "Run Configuration" to start the Toolbox server.

Having all three repos checked out in a single IntelliJ project can be useful to have the code on-hand, but to actually run Toolbox using the local Hoist libraries some additional steps are required.

  • To run the server using the local hoist-core, edit the toolbox/gradle.properties file and set runHoistInline=true. Note this is not required if you're not changing any hoist-core code - you can still have the project structure setup as described, and only flip this switch if/when testing a local change to the plugin.
  • To run the client using the local hoist-react, start your local webpack-dev-server from the toolbox/client-app directory by running yarn startWithHoist.

Developing with HTTPS on xh.io domain

It can be useful to run Toolbox locally with HTTPS enabled and on a sub-domain of xh.io, especially when testing OAuth, CORS, or cookie dependent features. Follow these steps to run with HTTPS on the toolbox-local.xh.io:3000 domain:

  1. Add this entry to your dev machine's hosts file: 127.0.0.1 toolbox-local.xh.io
  2. Start the Grails server with the additional VM options below. The referenced files are self-signed certs commited to the repo for local dev purposes. 
    -Dserver.ssl.enabled=true
-Dserver.ssl.certificate=classpath:local-dev/toolbox-local.xh.io-self-signed.crt
-Dserver.ssl.certificate-private-key=classpath:local-dev/toolbox-local.xh.io-self-signed.key
-Dserver.ssl.trust-certificate=classpath:local-dev/toolbox-local.xh.io-self-signed.ca.crt
  3. Visit https://toolbox-local.xh.io:8080/ping in your browser to proceed past the SSL warning for API calls.
  4. Start the GUI with the startWithHoistSecure npm script. Go to https://toolbox-local.xh.io:3000/app/ in your browser and proceed past the SSL warning.

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