🚀 Launchpad

Launchpad is a starting point for amazing applications.

It provides some simple setting up and configuration, so that you can just start building something!

• Run
• Develop
• Deploy

Summary

Launchpad uses Docker to set up and run a webserver using NodeJS, the Feathers framework, a Postgres database, and Redis caching.

It renders a user interface using React and manages the UI state with Redux. Navigation between pages is managed by react-redux-router.

Browser assets are compiled using Webpack. A Webpack Dev Server is provided, with additional support for Hot Module Replacement and React Hot Loader.

Launchpad's testing framework is Mocha, flavored with Chai for assertions and expectations. Enzyme is included to make testing React components simple and straightforward. Basic style and syntax patterns are enforced by eslint, but it's also helpful for catching syntax errors as well.

Run

1. Install Docker.
2. Run docker-compose up inside this directory (optionally include the -d flag to suppress output).
3. Visit localhost:3030 from your favorite browser.

Running locally

Run docker-compose up -d to bring up the services in detached mode. Since the services are running in their containers, it will be as if they were all running in the background. This is great for development.

• To stop the services: docker-compose stop
• To restart the services: docker-compose start
• To bring down the network and remove the containers: docker-compose down

Start and stop individual services

Each service can be run independently by using its name as an argument to a command. The available services are:

• feathers
• webpack
• postgres
• redis

e.g. docker-compose start postgres

Develop

The Docker setup provides very helpful shortcuts and configuration when running the server. When developing an application, it is usually faster and more helpful to install software to your host machine. Usually, you won't need to have Postgres or Redis installed on your host machine. Just the Node software should be enough to get up and running.

One of Launchpad's basic assumptions is that it's faster and easier to delete code and utilities that you don't need, rather than install and configure code and utilities that you do. For example, if you don't need a database, then go ahead and remove the Postgres service from the docker-compose.yml file and remove sequelize from your Feathers services. It all comes down to entropy, really, and Launchpad wants to reduce it as much as possible.

Install

npm install

This should install the relevant packages to your machine.

A note on adding dependencies

When a new dependency is added to the project, the docker containers for Feathers and Webpack will need to be rebuilt, in order to install the new packages. For this reason, you may find it easier to run the Feathers and Webpack services from your own host machine, after their packages have been installed. Remember that the addresses Feathers uses for Postgres and Redis will have to be adjusted to use localhost, instead of their Docker-provided hosts.

Test

Before running tests on your host machine, make sure you've installed all the Node modules (see above). WHile tests can run in Docker containers, it's faster and easier to run them on your own. Also, ensure that the Postgres and Redis services are running with docker-compose start postgres redis. If they are not running, the Feathers application will time out when testing request responses.

Then, simply run npm test and all your tests in the test/ directory will be run.

• To run tests without linting, run npm run mocha.
• To run linting without tests, run npm run lint.

For more on running tests, check out the README file in the /test directory.

Scaffold

Feathers has a powerful command line interface. Here are a few things it can do:

$ npm install -g feathers-cli             # Install Feathers CLI

$ feathers generate service               # Generate a new Service
$ feathers generate hook                  # Generate a new Hook
$ feathers generate model                 # Generate a new Model
$ feathers help                           # Show all commands

Deploy

As it happens, Docker provides a very nice elegant interface for code deployment with its Machine utility. The following steps will walk through using docker-machine and DigitalOcean to create a remote host and deploy Launchpad to it. But before following these steps, try walking through the provided example in order to familiarize the process and ensure everything's working correctly.

1. Create a remote host (a droplet): docker-machine create launchpad --driver digitalocean
2. The package installation process uses slightly more RAM than the base-level droplet provides, so sign in to the management console and resize your droplet to use the next tier of 1GB memory (in theory, there are ways to enable memory swapping on the droplet so that the installation can proceed with the base level of RAM, but in practice I've found them to be more complicated and less reliable than just resizing the droplet).
3. Make sure you're connected to the droplet: docker-machine ls should show the launchpad machine as active. If you're not connected, use docker-machine env launchpad to get instructions on how to connect.
4. Build and run the services using the production configuration: docker-compose -f docker-compose.production.yml up (optionally provide the -d flag to suppress output).

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Launchpad was developed by Allan Lasser for Massive.

Licensed under the MIT license.