Check Web

Verify breaking news online.

Overview

This is the web client of Check.

Dependencies

• Node.js (tested with version 6.9.2) and NPM modules as defined in package.json
• Ruby and RubyGems (to run the tests)
• Optional: Inkscape and ImageMagick (to generate the favicon)

Installation

If you are just getting started, you probably want to install the full Check stack with Docker.

The full Check environment will install Node packages into an invisible node_modules/ directory. Instead of using npm run ..., run docker-compose exec web npm run ... to run in the Docker container: the Docker container can see the node_modules/ directory.

Watching for changes

The dev-mode Docker container will watch for file changes in src/ and rebuild whenever a file changes. It will output a message (success or error) after each rebuild.

Localization

Translations are managed in Transifex. All the contents are stored in the localization directory which contains the following subfolders:

• localization/react-intl: files extracted by babel-plugin-react-intl (localizable strings)
• localization/transifex: files above, but converted to Transifex JSON format
• localization/translations: files downloaded from Transifex in JavaScript format

The application is displayed in the browser's language using the files from the localization directory.

Developing

Adding a new language

Copy config-build.js.example to config-build.js (if you don't have it yet) and add your Transifex user and password.

Then you can use npm run transifex:upload and npm run transifex:download to upload and download translations, respectively.

Applying css styles

Components

Use locally scoped css styles for all components. Reference a css file with [componentname].module.css as the naming pattern to automatically enable css module scoping.

Maintaining package-lock.json

Run docker-compose exec web npm install [--save-dev] MODULE [...]. This will overwrite package-lock.json. Commit and deploy package-lock.json alongside any change to package.json.

Publishing meedan-maintained modules to npmjs.org

(For Meedan employees.) If:

• You are a member of the Meedan npmjs org; and
• You mean to install a fork of a buggy JavaScript module -- or a new module

Then publish it to npm. Name the module @meedan/name-of-my-module (in its package.json) and then npm publish. After, you may docker-compose exec web npm install [--save-dev] MODULE to use it in check-web.

Integration tests

Running

• Start the test environment in the check repository: docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-test.yml up
• Copy test/config.yml.example to test/config.yml and set the configurations
• Copy test/config.js.example to test/config.js and set the configurations
• Copy test/config.js.example to config.js and set the configurations
• Run docker-compose exec web npm test:integration

For Alegre, Pender and Check API that are executed for the integration tests: for each of them, if there is a branch with the same name as the Check Web branch, it's going to be used. Otherwise, it will use develop.

You can run a single integration test this way: docker-compose exec web bash -c "cd test && rspec --example KEYWORD spec/integration_spec.rb".

By default, when a test fails, it's retried up to 3 times on CI and not retried locally. You can control it by using the environment variable TEST_RETRY_COUNT. For example, for five attempts: docker-compose exec web bash -c "cd test && TEST_RETRY_COUNT=5 rspec --example KEYWORD spec/integration_spec.rb".

By default, only unit tests will run for branches on Travis other than develop or master. In order to run all the tests in any branch it's just necessary to include [full ci] in your commit message, and the commit doesn't even need to contain anything, for example: git commit --allow-empty -m '[full ci] Run all integration tests for this branch'. Furthermore, if you wish to run only the smoke tests, include [smoke tests] in your commit message. Similarly, you can add [similarity tests] in your commit message to run only the similarity tests.

Tests can also be completely skipped if your commit message contains [skip ci] (please note that in this case all continuous integration pipelines will be skipped, including deployments).

Writing

• Use API calls (instead of using Selenium) to create all test data you need before the real thing that the test is testing
• Tag the test with one of the existing tags (bins) so that the parallel threads stay balanced

Unit tests

• Run all unit tests: docker-compose exec web npm run test:unit
• Run a single unit test file:

$ docker compose exec web bash
# npm run test:unit TestFileName
> RUNS src/app/components/example/TestFileName.test.js

• Run a single unit test:

./node_modules/.bin/jest -t KEYWORD path/to/TestFile.test.js

Missing tests

If you don't have time to implement an integration test for your feature, please add a pending test for that, like this:

it "should do whatever my feature expects" do
  skip("Needs to be implemented")
end

In order to implement a pending unit test, do this:

it("should do whatever my unit expects");

Notes and tips

• Remove your node_modules directory if you face errors related to npm install