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Repository files navigation

Quansight Website

Orientation 🗺

Here is some basic info to help orient you to this repo.

  • This repo holds the code for two websites:
  • The websites' content lives in Storyblok (requires login).
    • But Labs and Consulting blog posts live under ./apps/labs/posts and ./apps/consulting/posts, respectively.
  • The websites are hosted and deployed via Vercel (requires login).
  • The repo's default branch is develop, not main.
    • Most pull requests (including Labs blog posts) will be opened against develop.
    • main is used for production (i.e., the live websites).
    • You can think of develop as staging.
    • Only hotfixes and releases are to be opened against main.
    • Pushing commits to main triggers a deployment of both websites via Vercel.

Deployment Schedule 📆

The current schedule for website deployment to live is weekly, on Tuesdays. Please arrange to have all PRs that you wish to go live on a given week merged to develop by end-of-day of the immediately preceding Monday.

We are following a rotating deployment manager schedule monthly as follows:

For months with a 5th Tuesday, the deployment manager role will follow the same rotation sequence. Thus, through 2023:

  • 29 Nov 2022: @bskinn
  • 31 Jan 2023: @gabalafou
  • 30 May 2023: @pavithraes
  • 29 Aug 2023: @trallard
  • 31 Oct 2023: @bskinn

Please coordinate your PRs and other deployment-related matters in the #qwebsite-ops Slack channel.

How to make changes to the website 👨🏿‍💻

Note Before reading this section, familiarize yourself with Vercel environments.

This repo contains two websites (Consulting and Labs), but the process to update either is essentially the same.

There are primarily two types of website changes, each with its process:

  • Content changes (Storyblok, our CMS - Content Management System)
  • Code changes (this GitHub repo)

Note that Labs blog posts are a bit of an exception. Categorically they are content changes, but the content lives in the Git repo -- so technically they are code changes, and they follow the process for code changes.

Note Once issue #396 is implemented, the Consulting blog posts will be converted to use the same machinery as the Labs posts, and after that time the Consulting blog posts will also follow the process for code changes.

This section will cover the process for each type of change.

Content changes (Storyblok) 📰

Content in Storyblok moves through several stages: drafting -> reviewing -> ready to publish -> published -> deployed. It's confusing, but "published" in our Storyblok configuration does not mean that the content has gone live on the corresponding public website. However, you should never publish any content in Storyblok if it is not ready for public presentation. In our configuration, publishing content in Storyblok is a signal to the rest of the team that says: this content is ready at any time to appear on the public website. If it's not ready, don't hit the publish button.

The Storyblok process is covered in more detail in the GitHub repo's wiki. A simplified version is presented here.

The process for creating, updating, or deleting content in Storyblok is the same. There are three major stages, each with distinct steps.

  1. Editing
    1. Make your changes in Storyblok.
    2. Preview how your changes will look on the site using Storyblok's preview iframe. You should see a yellow overlay at the top of the page telling you that you can see draft content.
    3. Save your changes.
  2. Publishing
    1. Subscribe to Slack channel #website-vercel-bot-log if you are not already subscribed.
    2. Once your content changes are approved, click the publish button in Storyblok. Remember, clicking "publish" means that you are certifying that to the best of your knowledge, these changes should be ready to be deployed at any time to the live website. When you click the publish button, Storyblok will make a request to Vercel to start a preview deployment.
    3. Look for deployment notifications in Slack. Vercel will send a message to the #website-vercel-bot-log channel containing a link to the preview URL.
    4. Visit the Vercel preview URL to review and double-check your changes.
  3. Going live
    1. When you want your changes to go to the live production site, coordinate with the dev team to open a merge pull request to the main branch on GitHub. Refer to the deployment schedule to see whom you should specifically reach out to.
    2. When the Vercel GitHub app comments on the merge PR with a preview URL, visit that preview URL to check your changes. (You should also be able to get the Vercel preview URL from the Slack channel.)
    3. If it all looks good, coordinate with the dev team to merge the PR to the main branch.
    4. Once that PR is merged to main, wait for the production build to finish deploying (check our internal Slack channel for notifications), then check your changes against the live site. You may need to clear your browser's cache before you can see your changes.

Code changes (GitHub) 💻

Code changes move through three stages, each of which corresponds to a branch in git: a feature branch (PR), then the develop branch, then main. When your code gets merged to the main branch, Vercel deploys it to the public website.

Note You should never merge your code into the develop branch unless it's ready for deployment (via merge to main). Putting your code into the develop branch is a signal to the rest of your team that says: this code is ready to run on the public website.

These are the concrete steps to follow to move your code from branch to branch:

  1. Open a pull request against the develop branch. This will kick off preview deployments in Vercel. Vercel will add a comment to your pull request with links to the preview URLs.

  2. Check one or both preview URLs depending on whether your change affects one or both sites.

  3. Once your pull request has been reviewed and approved, commit it to the develop branch.

    • Consider doing a squash-merge, especially if your pull request is relatively small, to keep a clean commit history.

  4. When you want your code change to go live, cut a release branch from develop, then open a pull request to merge the release branch into main. From the command line:

    git checkout develop
git pull
git checkout -b release-YYYYMMDD
git push -u origin release-YYYYMMDD

    Be sure to use main as the base branch of your PR and not develop.

  5. Review both preview URLs that Vercel will add to your Pull Request.

  6. If all looks good and your Pull Request has gotten approval, then merge it into main. This will kick off a production deployment on Vercel. Check the live public websites once the deployment is finished (Vercel will send a notification to the Slack channel. You may need to clear your browser's cache before you can see your changes.

  7. Delete the release branch if GitHub did not automatically delete it when you merged your Pull Request.

A word about the word "preview" 🤔

There is a semantic trap in the word "preview." Storyblok, Next.js, and Vercel all use the word preview, and it means different things to each of them.

Storyblok has two kinds of API keys: a preview key and a public key. With the Storyblok preview key, you can pass either version=draft or version=published to the Storyblok content API, where version=draft shows the Saved version of content from Storyblok and version=published shows the Published version from Storyblok. (Side note: Storyblok has multiple APIs, but the main API we are concerned with is the content API). In contrast, the public key only allows access to published content.

Next.js supports a preview mode. The framework provides a method to set a cookie on the client. When this cookie is set, Next.js renders pages dynamically instead of statically and passes a boolean to the runtime. This allows the site to switch its behavior at runtime -- for example, passing version=draft to the Storyblok API when Next.js preview mode is activated versus version=published when it is not.

Finally, Vercel has preview URLs and a preview environment. Preview URLs point to builds (or deployments) that were performed in a preview environment.

It would be nice if all of these different uses of preview mapped cleanly to each other, but they do not. For example, you may be on a Vercel preview URL, but you may or may not be in Next.js preview mode. The Vercel preview environment uses the Storyblok preview key, but if it's not in Next.js preview mode, it passes version=published to the Storyblok API and you will see only Published content from Storyblok.

Everything has been configured so that you shouldn't have to think about this too much, but just in case you find yourself confused, hopefully, this section will help clear things up.

Integrations 🛠

Making changes to the website relies on the ability of several services to interact with each other. This section is for developers and covers each service one by one and how it integrates with some other services.

GitHub

The Vercel app is installed on GitHub. The app kicks off deployments on Vercel whenever someone opens a pull request or pushes a commit to the repo. All of these deployments are preview deployments (meaning they use the preview environment in Vercel and associated environment variables), except for commits to the main branch. Commits to the main branch are specially recognized by Vercel as a signal to deploy the live website.

Storyblok

Each website has its own "space" and configuration in Storyblok.

Each website has a unique pair of API keys: preview and public. The preview API key allows API access to both published and draft content. The public key only allows access to published content. The Vercel production environment is configured with the value of the public API key so that it cannot accidentally access the draft content. The Vercel preview environment (as well as the local development environment) uses the preview API key so that the website team can preview draft content.

Each website's publish function in Storyblok is connected to a webhook on Vercel. When this Vercel webhook is called, it does a preview deployment based on the current commit of the develop branch on GitHub.

The Storyblok preview iframe is configured to show content previews against the Vercel URL that points to the latest build off the develop branch. This was done to help ensure that if there are any possible issues or conflicts between code changes and content changes, they will be caught early on. The Storyblok editor automatically passes cache-busting query string parameters (as in ?_storyblok=<timestamp>) to the preview URL, so it should be okay to use a constant URL base, such as quansight-consulting-git-develop-quansight.vercel.app, rather than the always changing SHA-based Vercel preview URLs (quansight-consulting-<SHA>-quansight.vercel.app).

There is a fair amount of code in the codebase that integrates with Storyblok. For example, there is a bridge that syncs the site with changes coming from the Storyblok editor.

Some middleware checks if the HTTP referrer is https://app.storyblok.com/. In that case, the code assumes that the end user is coming to the site from within the Storyblok iframe. So it puts the user in Next.js preview mode. When the user is in preview mode, the website shows a yellow overlay at the top of the page, letting the user know that they are seeing draft content on the site.

Vercel

Each website corresponds to a separate project in Vercel, quansight-consulting, and quansight-labs, respectively. However, because both projects are mapped to the same repository on GitHub, whenever a commit is made to the repo, whether the commit was only for the Consulting site or the Labs site, it triggers a preview deployment for both sites. Likewise, whenever a merge is made to the main branch, it triggers a production deployment to both live websites.

Each Vercel project has settings that allow it to integrate with Storyblok, Next.js, and GitHub. Each Vercel project has three separate environments: development, preview, and production. The development and preview environments contain the preview key to Storyblok. The production environment contains the public key to Storyblok, which only allows access to the published version of the content, not the draft version.

Each Vercel project is also configured with a webhook that Storyblok uses to kick off a preview deployment of the develop branch whenever new content is published in Storyblok.

Slack

There is a Vercel app for Slack. It is set up to send deployment notifications to the #website-vercel-bot-log channel.

Next.js plus the codebase in this repo

The code in this repo is built on top of the Next.js framework. Next.js has a feature called preview mode. When preview mode is turned on (via a cookie), the Next.js framework dynamically renders each page; otherwise, it serves a static, pre-rendered page (except when doing local development, and then it always dynamically renders each page).

The code in this repo takes advantage of the Next.js preview mode to integrate better with Storyblok and Vercel. When the code detects preview mode, it defaults to passing {"version": "draft"} to the Storyblok API to preview content that has been saved but not yet published -- in other words, draft content.

There is also code that detects when the request comes from a Storyblok iframe. In this case, the code forces the browser to automatically enter into Next.js preview mode.

To help the end user distinguish which view of the site they are seeing, the codebase defines a visual overlay at the top of each page. When the site is in preview mode, the overlay turns yellow and displays a message telling the user that they can see draft content. When the site is not in preview mode, the overlay turns gray and tells the user that they can see published content. The overlay provides a clickable link to switch in and out of Next.js preview mode. This switch is turned off when the user is viewing the page via the Storyblok UI because when they are working within Storyblok, they should always see the site in Next.js preview mode so that they can see changes that are being worked on. The overlay does not show at all if the site was built in a production environment.

The codebase takes advantage of Vercel environment variables at build time. For example, the preview mode overlay links to the git branch that the site was built from (when that environment variable is available at build time).

Ways to view the site at different stages 🔍

Throughout the develop-deploy process, there are several ways to view the website. The following table summarizes the important ways in which those views differ from each other.

Name How to access GitHub branch Vercel env Storyblok API key Next.js preview? Storyblok version param Display top overlay? Top overlay color Button to enter/exit preview?
Production .com/.org URL main production public off published No n/a n/a
Storyblok (yellow overlay) via Storyblok UI develop preview preview on draft Yes yellow No
Vercel URL (gray overlay) via link to Vercel URL any non-main preview preview off published Yes gray Yes
Vercel URL (yellow overlay) via enter-preview any non-main preview preview on draft Yes yellow Yes

Let's take the row labeled "Vercel URL (gray overlay)." This view is accessed by clicking on a Vercel SHA-style URL, which looks like https://labs-{SHA}-quansight.vercel.app. Typically, this URL is found either on a GitHub pull request or in #website-vercel-bot-log in Slack. The site served by that URL can be built from any branch or commit on GitHub except main, which is reserved for production. It is built with the "preview" Vercel environment. It does not start in Next.js preview mode (though the end user can switch to it). The preview Vercel environment contains the preview Storyblok API key. The site passes version=published to the Storyblok API. It displays a gray overlay at the top of each page, and that gray overlay contains a way for the end user to switch to and out of the Next.js preview mode.

Note that within Storyblok, there is no button to switch out of preview mode. This was done by design because the whole point of the Storyblok UI is to be able to preview content that hasn't been published yet.

System design decisions 🏗

Each website should have only one project in Vercel. Having more than one project results in several preview URLs being posted to each pull request on GitHub, which makes it hard for reviewers to know which preview URL they should review. With only one project per website, you get one preview URL (per website) posted to the pull request. If it's not clear from the pull request title or code which website the PR affects, the author should clarify in the PR description. Ideally, the PR author should add one or both of the (Labs, Consulting) GitHub labels, as appropriate, to mark the site(s) that the changes are meant to affect.

Code in the main branch should only be used by the production Vercel environment, and it should show only published content from Storyblok. While it may be tempting to want to see draft content against the main branch code, it creates the potential for confusion, and it is better not to allow it. For example, if someone takes a screenshot of a webpage, and in the screenshot, you can see in the browser address bar that the URL is on the live production site (such as quansight.com), then there is no doubt that you're seeing content that was published in Storyblok at the time the main branch was deployed to production. The other reason for this discipline is that it's better to limit reviewers and content editors to previewing draft content against the develop branch to help catch any potential code/content conflicts before merging to main.

When viewing the site in local development or at a Vercel preview URL, there should be a overlay that explains that you are looking at a preview of the site. This helps reduce confusion when screenshots are shared. This overlay should not be present on a production build of the site.

The preview/development environment overlay should allow the user to toggle between seeing published versus draft/saved Storyblok content. The overlay should change colors to indicate which of the two content preview modes the user is in (that is, whether they are seeing draft or published content from Storyblok).

The above should hold except when the user is using the Storyblok web interface; then the website should always be in "draft" mode, showing saved (but not published) content. And as mentioned previously, it should show this content against the latest code from the develop branch (not the main branch). Related: The content team shouldn't have to think about which URL to use with the Storyblok editor. It should be only one default URL, and this URL should show draft content against the latest code in develop.

Hitting the publish button in Storyblok should not push that content to the public-facing site; rather, it should queue up the content for the next production deployment. This prevents bypassing any GitHub workflows that have been set up for quality control.

Content that is marked as "published" in Storyblok should be ready to be pushed to production at any time. Likewise, code that is merged into the develop branch on GitHub should also be ready to be pushed to main at any time. Respecting this discipline should allow anyone to deploy a new version of the site to production at any time.

All production deploys should happen via commits or merges to the main branch. Vercel is opinionated about this. We should follow the conventions and opinions of the systems we integrate. If there is a content change that needs to bypass code changes in the develop branch, a pull request can be made to update a log file. That single commit can then be merged into the main branch to kick off a deployment. This is a hotfix for content. A hotfix for code can be done similarly.

Running the website locally 🖥

Prerequisites:

Short version (Labs site)

Copy and paste the following commands:

git clone git@github.com:Quansight/Quansight-website.git 
cd Quansight-website 
npm install 
cp apps/labs/.env.example apps/labs/.env 
npm run start:labs

Longer version

To run the website locally on your machine, you must first clone this git repo, cd into the repo, then run npm install.

This repo contains two projects (websites): Consulting and Labs. (We are not currently using the Consulting project.) You must create a .env file for each project that you want to develop locally. For example, for Quansight Labs, you will need to create apps/labs/.env. You can do this by copying the example environment file:

cp apps/labs/.env.example apps/labs/.env

Note: You should not modify the example environment file.

Run npm run start:labs to start a corresponding dev server. Navigate to http://localhost:4200/ or use localhost in the Storyblok preview panel. On the local host, the app will automatically reload if you change any of the source files, whereas in the Storyblok panel you need to refresh the page manually.

Important: whenever the website's dependencies change or are updated, the lock file package-lock.json will be updated. Whenever package-lock.json is updated, you should re-run npm install (on CI, npm ci), so that your local environment's dependencies will match the production environment.

Adding new components 🧩

  1. Create the component with its schema in Storyblok components.
  2. Create the React component. The components are located in /apps/consulting/components (Consulting components), /apps/labs/components (Labs components), or /libs/shared/ui-components/src (shared components). The name of the Storyblok component should be the same as the name of the React component.
  3. (Only if you're adding a shared component) Add a component and types imports in the /libs/shared/ui-components/src/index.ts file to make it available in the apps.
  4. Add Storyblok raw data types to the /apps/.../types/storyblok folder.
  5. Import these raw data types to the /apps/.../types/storyblok/rawBlok.ts file and add them to the collective TRawBlock type.
  6. Add Storyblok props mapper to /apps/.../components/BlokProvider/mappers folder.
  7. Import this props mapper to /apps/.../components/BlockProvider/utils/getPropsByType.ts file and add the case to the switch statement.
  8. Import the Next component to the /apps/.../components/BlockProvider/componentsMap.ts file and add it to the componentsMap variable.
  9. Import the Next.js component types to the /apps/.../components/BlockProvider/types.ts file, add the component name to the ComponentType enum and add the props types to the TBlokComponentPropsMap type.

Adding new queries 🗃

You can fetch data from Storyblok directly using queries. To add the query:

  1. Add the query schema .graphql file to the /apps/.../api/queries folder.
  2. Run npm run codegen:quansight or npm run codegen:labs command, depending on which site are you adding the query to.
  3. Create the data retrieval function in the /apps/.../api/utils folder using the function, type, and hook created by the code gen script.

GitHub-based blog workflow (Labs blog) 💻

All the Quansight Labs blog posts are located inside apps/labs/post, and therefore, any new posts must be added to this same folder.

Note For now, all posts should be contributed using a branch-and-merge strategy within the website repo itself, instead of a fork-and-merge strategy. This may change in the future.

Every post is a .md or .mdx file. The posts directory also contains a categories.json file containing the posts categories.

The categories.json file is also used for displaying category filters on the /blog page so after adding a new category, it will also be visible on that page.

For more details about .mdx please see:

Structure of the blog post

Every post is structured with two main sections: meta and content. The content section is the body of the post added in Markdown format. The meta section is a YAML like structure and should be wrapped with --- signs. The meta section contains post-related information like:

  • title (required) - Title of the blog post. Used also as the title of the page inside <title></title> tag
  • description (required) - Description of the blog post. Used inside <meta name="description" /> tag
  • published (required) - Publishing date of the blog post. Used also for sorting posts by date (the format should be Month d, yyyy for example January 1, 2023)
  • authors (required) - Array of unique author slugs (from Storyblok). Usually the blog post will have only one author and the value of this field will look like [tania-allard], but when the same blog post has multiple authors it will look like [tania-allard, ralf-gommers]. Based on this property, the blog post page will display proper info about the author(s) (and their avatars). The author(s) must be present in Storyblok in order for the post to build without error.
  • category (required) - Array of categories for example [Machine Learning]. All categories should be the same as in the previously mentioned categories.json file. Important note: categories are case-sensitive.
  • featuredImage (required) - Object with two required properties: src and alt.
    • The src property is a path to the featured image which is displayed both (a) in the posts gallery on the/blog page and (b) in rich social media preview cards (on Twitter, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.). The image should be added to the apps/labs/public/posts/<post-slug> directory and the src property should be /posts/<post-slug/<image-filename-with-extension>. For example, if the filename of your blog post is hello-world.md and the filename of your featured image is featured-image.png, then you save the image at apps/labs/public/posts/hello-world/featured-image.png, and src would be /posts/hello-world/featured-image.png. This image should (a) be in PNG or JPEG format and (b) have close to a 2:1 aspect ratio and a minimum height of 627 pixels. If you're unsure about how your image will appear in social media preview cards, you can open a PR for your blog post, get the preview build URL to your post, then paste the preview URL in a draft social media post to see how the card will look on that social media platform.1
    • The alt property is alternative text for the image.
  • hero (required) - the object for the Hero section of the post. This can have two different structures:
    • The first structure is an object with imageSrc and imageAlt. The imageSrc property is a path to the hero image, which is displayed on the blog post page between the nav bar and the blog heading title. The imageAlt property is alternative text for the image. The image should be added to the apps/labs/public/posts/<post-name> directory, for example, apps/labs/public/posts/hello-world-post.
    • The second structure is an object with properties: imageMobile,imageTablet, and imageDesktop. Each of these properties also contain imageSrc and imageAlt properties.
    • For both of these structures, there is no need to provide full image paths, so the path names should start with/posts/.

Example of blog post meta section

title: 'This is hello world post!'
authors: [anirrudh-krishnan]
published: October 14, 2022
description: 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet'
category: [Machine Learning]
featuredImage:
  src: /posts/hello-world-post/featured.png
  alt: 'Excellent alt-text describing the featured image'
hero:
  imageSrc: /posts/hello-world-post/hero.jpeg
  imageAlt: 'Excellent alt-text describing the hero image'

Adding a new blog post 📝

  1. Create a new feature branch. Example: feature/new-hello-world-post.
  2. Add post feature and hero images to apps/labs/public/posts/<post-name>.
  3. Add a new .md|.mdx file inside the app/labs/posts directory. Make sure to read the Structure of the blog post section in this file to ensure that the post is properly structured.
  4. Commit and push your changes to the repository. For commits please follow the format of the conventional commit. See
  5. Create a pull request to the develop branch. Make sure to add the type: content 📝 and labs 🔭 labels to the PR.
  6. Wait for someone in the website team to review the new blog post. If everything is ok, the PR will be merged to the develop branch.

Adding a new blog category

  1. Create a new feature branch.
  2. Ope the apps/labs/posts/categories.json file.
  3. Add a new category to the array. Make sure to follow the same format as the other categories.
  4. Commit and push your changes to the repository. For commits please follow the format of the conventional commit. See
  5. Wait for someone in the website team to review the new blog post. If everything is ok, the PR will be merged to the develop branch.

Adding new components for usage inside .mdx posts

  1. Open apps/labs/services/blogAllowedComponents.ts file
  2. Import the component from the codebase
  3. Add a new component to blogAllowedComponents object.

Specifications for Hero Images in Storyblok

There are two options to add images to the Hero component in Storyblok, for non-blog pages of both the Consulting and Labs sites.

  1. The first one is to add the image in the General tab of the Hero component - this image will be used for all screen sizes.
  2. The second one is to add different images for the three screen sizes in their respective tabs: Image Mobile, Image Tablet, and Image Desktop. When choosing this second option, you MUST add images for all three screen sizes.

By default, the images in the Hero component adjust their size to fill the full width of the container box (objectFit: cover). You can customize this behavior by choosing a different objectFit property.

  • Contain: the image is scaled to maintain its aspect ratio while fitting within the element's content box (height).
  • Cover: the image is sized to maintain its aspect ratio while filling the element's entire content box (width).

Footnotes

  1. Note that Twitter post previews can be flaky and LinkedIn has a useful post-inspector tool. ↩

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