transcription-service

A self service app for journalists to upload audio/video files and receive transcription through email notifications.

We use localstack to run SQS locally rather than needing to create 'dev' queues in AWS. This is set up via docker.

Get started

1. Get Janus creds (for fetching creds from AWS Parameter Store)
2. Use the scripts/setup.sh script to install dependencies, set up the nginx mapping and create a docker based sqs queue

nvm use
scripts/setup.sh

3. Run the express backend API:

npm run api::start

4. Run the Next.js frontend:

npm run client::start

If all goes well the frontend is available at https://transcribe.local.dev-gutools.co.uk and the backend is available at https://api.transcribe.local.dev-gutools.co.uk

Emulating a production deployment

Occasionally you will want to develop something which relies on the specific ways we deploy into production.

When in development we run two web servers, the client nextjs dev server has features like autoreloading on changes and it proxies to the api express server.

In production we only run an express server which serves the client bundle whenever you hit a non-API endpoint. This is so that the clientside can handle routing for non-api endpoints.

If you are writing something that depends specifically on interactions between the API sever and the frontend you may want to check it works in production. First you need to update the config value of rootUrl to https://api.transcribe.local.dev-gutools.co.uk and then run npm run emulate-prod-locally. This will trigger a build and have your express web server provide the frontend bundle, rather than the nextjs server.

Then you can test the app using https://api.transcribe.local.dev-gutools.co.uk

Purging local queue

If you change the structure of messages on the queue you'll probably want to purge all local messages. There's a script for that!

./scripts/purge-local-queue.sh