Selfies from the Trail Demo app

Local Development

In order to speed up local development, env vars can be written to a .env file instead of being requested each time the server process starts.

A helper file is included to write the necessary values to the .env file:

./bin/write-env selfies-from-the-trail-staging

Then you should be able to run the server locally:

# This will start the server and webpack for the client
# which will rebuild the client on every change
npm run dev
# If you have nodemon installed and want to
# restart the server on every change as well
npm run nodemon

Production

When starting the app in production mode, the file src/dotenv.js will run one synchronous request to get all the config vars from process.env.SERVER_APP_NAME (using process.env.HEROKU_TOKEN as the token) and write them all to process.env.

Deploying

In order to speed up deploys, the client files are built locally by running npm run build and then committed to the repo. Subsequent deploys will use these committed files. This also speeds up the deploy process by allowing only the server dependencies to be specified in dependencies in package.json.

npm run build
git add dist
git commit -m "Build dist"
git push

Share Domain

The resulting images and html file (used for the Twitter Card) are uploaded and served via S3 and are publically readable.

An environment variable of SHARE_DOMAIN can be set to any domain name including protocol (eg https://share.domain.net) which will be used as the public source for all user readable images and files.

If using a custom SHARE_DOMAIN, that domain will have to be setup to serve files from S3 with the following structure:

http://${BUCKET_NAME}.s3.amazonaws.com/public/${FILE_NAME} --> ${SHARE_DOMAIN}/${FILE_NAME}

Client Config

The client config values are located as part of the server config values in config/ to make it easier to edit and share values across the client/server. To ensure that no sensitive values are written to the client, the client config values are whitelisted inside webpack.config.js.