swh.web 0.0.195

Software Heritage Web UI

swh-web

This repository holds the development of Software Heritage web applications:

• swh-web API (https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api): enables to query the content of the archive through HTTP requests and get responses in JSON or YAML.

• swh-web browse (https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse): graphical interface that eases the navigation in the archive.

Documentation about how to use these components but also the details of their URI schemes can be found in the docs folder. The produced HTML documentation can be read and browsed at https://docs.softwareheritage.org/devel/swh-web/index.html.

Technical details

Those applications are powered by:

• Django Web Framework on the backend side with the following extensions enabled:

  • django-rest-framework
  • django-webpack-loader
  • django-js-reverse

• webpack on the frontend side for better static assets management, including:

  • assets dependencies management and retrieval through yarn
  • linting of custom javascript code (through eslint) and stylesheets (through stylelint)
  • use of es6 syntax and advanced javascript feature like async/await or fetch thanks to babel (es6 to es5 transpiler and polyfills provider)
  • assets minification (using UglifyJS and cssnano) but also dead code elimination for production use

How to build and run

Requirements

First you will need Python 3 and a complete swh development environment installed.

To run the backend, you need to have the following Python 3 modules installed:

• beautifulsoup4
• django >= 1.10.7
• djangorestframework >= 3.4.0
• django_webpack_loader
• django_js_reverse
• docutils
• file_magic >= 0.3.0
• htmlmin
• lxml
• pygments
• pypandoc
• python-dateutil
• pyyaml
• requests

To compile the frontend assets, you need to have nodejs >= 8.x and yarn installed. If you are on Debian stretch, you can easily install an up to date nodejs from the stretch-backports repository while packages for yarn can be installed by following these instructions.

Alternatively, you can install yarn with npm install yarn, and add YARN=node_modules/yarn/bin/yarn as argument whenever you run make.

Please note that the static assets bundles generated by webpack are not stored in the git repository. Follow the instructions below in order to generate them in order to be able to run the frontend part of the web applications.

Make targets

Below is the list of available make targets that can be executed from the root directory of swh-web in order to build and/or execute the web applications under various configurations:

• run-django-webpack-devserver: Compile and serve not optimized (without mignification and dead code elimination) frontend static assets using webpack-dev-server and run django server with development settings. This is the recommended target to use when developing swh-web as it enables automatic reloading of backend and frontend part of the applications when modifying source files (*.py, *.js, *.css, *.html).

• run-django-webpack-dev: Compile not optimized (no minification, no dead code elimination) frontend static assets using webpack and run django server with development settings. This is the recommended target when one only wants to develop the backend side of the application.

• run-django-webpack-prod: Compile optimized (with minification and dead code elimination) frontend static assets using webpack and run django server with production settings. This is useful to test the applications in production mode (with the difference that static assets are served by django). Production settings notably enable advanced django caching and you will need to have memcached installed for that feature to work.

• run-django-server-dev: Run the django server with development settings but without compiling frontend static assets through webpack.

• run-django-server-prod: Run the django server with production settings but without compiling frontend static assets through webpack.

• run-gunicorn-server: Run the web applications with production settings in a gunicorn worker as they will be in real production environment.

Once one of these targets executed, the web applications can be executed by pointing your browser to http://localhost:5004.

Yarn targets

Below is a list of available yarn targets in order to only execute the frontend static assets compilation (no web server will be executed):

• build-dev: compile not optimized (without mignification and dead code elimination) frontend static assets and store the results in the swh/web/static folder.

• build: compile optimized (with mignification and dead code elimination) frontend static assets and store the results in the swh/web/static folder.

The build target must be executed prior performing the Debian packaging of swh-web in order for the package to contain the optimized assets dedicated to production environment.

To execute these targets, issue the following commmand:

$ yarn <target_name>