ITSG33 control panel

This project is aimed at helping people understand and use the ITSG-33 control catalogue.

Dev environment

The project's dev environment is managed via docker compose. Run docker-compose up in the repo root to build and launch a full dev version of the site. The ui will be available at localhost:3000, the api via localhost:4000/graphql and the database on localhost:8529.

The development docker containers watch for changes in both the host's ./ui and ./api src directories as well as their package-lock.json files. Reinstalling node modules and reloading project servers occurs as appropriate.

Node modules are installed in a separate volume inside the containers, the host's node modules (if they exist) from either project subdirectory are not used or modified. Note: if the host doesn't already have a node_modules directory created in one of the project subdirectories, the docker containers will inadvertently create an empty, root-owned, node_modules directory at those locations on the host file system. A weird little quirk. If this happens, you will likely get permission errors when next trying to run npm ci etc on the host system, so delete those root-owned node_modules directories and create your own (either manually or by running npm ci on the host OS). Once those directories exist on your system, subsequent dev containers will not mess with them.

Currently, ./controls.json is not watched. To re-load the database with new data, the docker containers should be taken down (ctl + C in the attached terminal) and re-launched (docker-compose up).

Attaching a node debugger

It will often be useful to attach a debugger to the ./api server. The api docker container already has the appropriate port (9229) open, but it isn't running the debugger by default for security reasons (see note below). To enable the debugger, open ./docker-compose.yaml and make the following edit:

api:
    ...
    # command: node --watch index.js
    command: node --inspect="0.0.0.0:9229" --watch index.js

Then (re)start the docker-compose dev containers. You can now connect to the api's debugger from your browser. This requires a browser with the V8 JS engine (so not Firefox or Safari). I also recommend the "Node.js V8 --inspector Manager (NiM)" browser extension if available in your browser of choice.

Note: --inspect="0.0.0.0:9229" is not best practice. Serving on "0.0.0.0" will expose the debugger to your entire local network! Best practice would be to serve to serve only to the loopback "127.0.0.1" (--inspect="127.0.0.1:9229"), but that would be the container's loopback and not reachable from your host! Fancier networking for our docker dev environment, to address this, is a TODO. For now, only enable the api debugger as needed (and preferably only when on a trusted network).