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Some Notes Before You Begin

Make sure you follow all of the steps in "Setting Up Your Development Environment" before attempting to even look at the code.

Also, read through the docs linked under the "Contributing to the Codebase" section so you can get a feel for the tools and syntax.

Resources on GraphQL/Apollo
These are pulled from https://www.apollographql.com/tutorials/browse

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Before you begin, create a folder for this team wherever you want to store any GitHub repos that you will be cloning on your device in this cohort. You can name it include, platform_team, or literally anything you want to. If you choose to name it "include", do not use a '#' in your folder name, it'll cause a bunch of problems later.

1. NODE.JS

Node.js is a runtime environment that is used to run Javascript code. It comes with the Node Package Manager (npm) that helps us manage the Javascript packages used in our project. To set up node.js:

  1. Download the Node.js installer for your OS from https://nodejs.org/en/download/current

  2. Run the installer and follow the installation wizard.

  3. Once the installation finishes, open a terminal on VSCode and type node --version to verify your node installation. Type npm --v to verify your npm installation.

    a. If you get an error saying that node or npm is not recognized as a command, try restarting VSCode to see if the issue fixes itself. (If you had VSCode opened while installing Node, this should fix it.) b. If the problem persists, search for Environment variables in your Start menu. Click on Edit your Environment variables. Click on Environment Variables in the new window that opens up. c. Find the variable Path and click on Edit. d. Check for C:\Program Files\nodejs\ in the list of paths that appear. If it's not there, click on New and add it to the list. e. Restart VSCode and it should ideally work now.

If you already have node
Try to update your node version to roughly v21.1.0 so you don't get random warnings.

2. ESLINT EXTENSION

ESLint is an extension that ensures that your code adheres to certain code style. It also auto-formats your code on save in VSCode. To enable it:

  1. Go to the Extensions tab on VSCode and install ESLint.

  2. Once it is installed, open your Command Palette by pressing Ctrl + SHift + P/Command + Shift + P and search for Preferences: Open Workspace Settings (JSON). Open the file and add this code into the file. This will autoformat your code on save and also configure tab sizes:

    {
    "editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
        "source.fixAll.eslint": "explicit"
    },
    "eslint.validate": [
        "javascript",
        "typescript",
    ],
    "[javascriptreact]": {
        "editor.indentSize": 2
    },
    "[javascript]": {
        "editor.indentSize": 2
    },
    "[typescriptreact]": {
        "editor.indentSize": 2
    },
    "[typescript]": {
        "editor.indentSize": 2
    },
    "[jsonc]": {
        "editor.indentSize": 2
    },
}

3. Postgres

  1. Install Postgres by following this tutorial: https://www.prisma.io/dataguide/postgresql/setting-up-a-local-postgresql-database#setting-up-postgresql-on-windows
  2. Follow this tutorial to create a user and create a database: https://commandprompt.com/education/how-to-create-user-create-database-grant-privileges-in-postgresql/
  3. Grant the user you just created CREATEDB permissions with the command ALTER USER username CREATEDB;

4. DBeaver

By now, you should have a database and user created in postgres. This means you can try connecting to it in DBeaver, a nice UI tool that allows you to view your database and also view ER diagrams.

  1. Connect to your database by clicking the new database connection in the top left corner. It should look like a Plug with a green + sign.
  2. Choose Postgres when asked for Database type.
  3. You should only have to change 3 things: "Database", "Username", and "Password". Change those to the name of the database you created, the name of your user, and the password you chose for that user.
  4. If it works, then you should be able to click into the database connection and view the contents by going through it like a file structure. The path for our data will be Databases --> [dbname] --> Schemas --> public. There shouldn't really be anything to see but if you can click around the "file structure" it means you're connected.

5. environment file

Create a file called .env in the root of the codebase and paste in the following (replace username, password, and db_name to fit your own information which is the same as what you input into DBeaver).

# development
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://<username>:<password>@localhost:5432/<db name>?schema=public"

I'll share the staging DATABASE_URL another way since we should keep that private.

6. Other Extensions

For GraphQL schema highlighting: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GraphQL.vscode-graphql-syntax Auto Rename Tag — useful for JSX

Getting Started

Set up:

npm install for package installations. This will install all packages specified in the package.json file.

Run the development server:

npm run dev

Open up http://localhost:4000/graphql to open the graphql playground and test your server

Run a linting test for the /src folder:

npm run lint

Contributing to the Codebase

React Resources

HTML/CSS Resources

App Router

Next.js versions 13+ implemented the App Router which allows for colocation of files. With the Page Router, we used to define pages directly by creating a jsx file with the page name inside of a pages directory.

Now, with App Router, we define pages by creating a directory within the app folder where a route is defined only when there is a page.jsx file inside of the directory. To create a new route, you will create a folder, for example: about-us and create a page.jsx file inside. Once you populate the page.jsx file with a React Component, the route http://[domain]/about-us should exist.

To create directories that are guarenteed to never produce a new route in your app, prefix the directory name with _, for example: _components. You can achieve the same thing by just naming it components and ensuring that no page.jsx file ever appears in the directory, however, I want to keep things explicit so we will stick with the underscore.

To create groupings of files without affecting the routes, you can wrap your folder name with parenthesis: (index-page). In our codebase, I have done this to seperate the front and backend by creating a grouping for (api) and (pages). Notice how (api) or (pages) never appears in our route when we navigate through the app. I have done this to (index-page) to group our page information for the route at / inside a folder rather than having it linger in the root of our (pages) directory.

Resources

Layouts

Next.js 13+ also added in the super useful tool called layouts. Layouts essentially wrap around your pages to provide the same "layout" to each page that the layout applies to. An example is having a Navbar and Footer that are shared by every page of the app. Rather than defining the Navbar and Footer in each page, you can add it to the root layout and have the layout apply to each page by writing the code once.

Layouts are defined with a layout.jsx file and the layout applies to:

  • the page in the directory of the layout file
  • all other pages that are descendents of the directory that layout.jsx is in.

Layouts also stack on top of each other. You could have a root layout that puts a navbar on the top of the page and another layout in the /examples route that puts a sidebar on anything examples related. This means when you navigate to /examples or /examples/some-example, you will see both a navbar and a sidebar. However, other routes like /about-us will only have a navbar since this route is only affected by the root layout.

Since we have a layout.jsx in the root of the (pages) directory, all of our frontend is affected by this file.

Resources

File Structure

To keep a maintainable codebase, we will be following strict rules that allow us to keep our codebase organized and clean. In the root of (pages), you will notice that we have three folders:

  • _components
  • _data
  • _hooks
  • _contexts

These folders should account for every type of file you'll ever need to create. In each subdirectory, for example, about-us, we can also have these folders.

Lets say I want to create the Navbar component. I will first think about which parts of the codebase the navbar is used by. Since the Navbar is a part of every page and called by the root layout, it makes sense to define the Navbar inside the _components folder of the root folder.

If I want to define a Sidebar that is only used by the examples route, and children of the examples route, then it makes sense to put the Sidebar component inside the _components folder of the examples directory. In short, find the level of nesting that accounts for all use cases for your component, data, utils, hooks and define your code in that level.

Note: The layout.jsx file in the root of (pages) sort of breaks the pattern I was talking about. It was supposed to be in the (index-page) directory since that handles all of the / routes, but a nuance of using the parenthesis to create route groupings forces us to put the layout.jsx on layer above. This won't be an issue for other pages however, so just put the layout.jsx with the page.jsx file whenever you plan on making a layout for certain routes.

Public Folder

The public folder is where we can store media such as pdfs, images, videos. To keep this organized, create a new folder for each page the content is related to. To access content in the public folder, you don't need to do any of the ../../public stuff. Next.js automatically routes / to the public folder.

For example, if you have an image stored in /public/about-us/alec.png, you can access it with /about-us/alec.png from anywhere in your code.

SCSS Modules

We will be using SCSS since it just provides more options for how to format our CSS code. If you don't want to learn SCSS, it's fine, since CSS works just as well in scss files. Also, we will be using css modules for our Next.js app. CSS Modules (in our case SCSS modules) are defined like so: Navbar.module.scss. The reason we are using modules is because they localize our CSS classes so there is no possibility of 2 people using the same class name and having conflict.

Resources

Integrating our GraphQL API

Anything GraphQL (API) related will be handled in the (api) folder. You'll notice 4 special folders: _graphql, _types, _utils.

_graphql folder

Here is where we will be defining some commonly used GraphQL queries and mutations. See the contents for examples.

_types folder

Since we are using typescript, each object returned from GraphQL queries must have a type definition. We will handle that here.

_utils folder

If there are any utility functions you believe would help keep the codebase clean, abstracted, and modularized, this is where you can define some helper functions.

Apollo Client

The Apollo Client is a useful tool used to integrate your frontend with a GraphQL server. The Apollo Client functions can be run within server actions and there are ways to make it run on both client and server components.

Resources