Software Heritage - Web applications#

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:
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 terser and cssnano but also dead code elimination for production use

How to build, run and test#

Backend 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.

To run the backend tests, the following Python 3 extra modules are also required to be installed.

One easy way to install them is to use the pip tool:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-test.txt

Frontend requirements#

To compile the frontend assets, you need to have nodejs >= 14.0.0 and yarn installed. If you are on Debian, you can easily install an up to date nodejs from the nodesource repository.

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 to execute the applications#

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.

Make targets to test the applications#

Some make targets are also available to easily execute the backend and frontend tests of the Software Heritage web applications.

The backend tests are powered by the pytest and hypothesis frameworks while the frontend ones rely on the use of the cypress tool.

Below is the exhaustive list of those targets:

test: execute the backend tests using a fast hypothesis profile (only one input example will be provided for each test)
test-full: execute the backend tests using a slower hypothesis profile (one hundred of input examples will be provided for each test which helps spotting possible bugs)
test-frontend: execute the frontend tests using cypress in headless mode but with some slow test suites disabled
test-frontend-full: execute the frontend tests using cypress in headless mode with all test suites enabled
test-frontend-ui: execute the frontend tests using the cypress GUI but with some slow test suites disabled
test-frontend-full-ui: execute the frontend tests using the cypress GUI with all test suites enabled

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 command:

$ yarn <target_name>