pay-frontend

GOV.UK Pay Frontend application (Node.js)

Running locally

Prerequisites

• This requires the Pay CLI, which is not publicly available at present.
• You have set up your local development environment
• Clone this repo locally.

Starting app

Copy .env.example and rename to .env. This contains the environment variables required to run the app, and contains the URLs for other microservices that frontend makes requests to, which default to the URLs that apps run using pay local are available on.

Start the Pay local environment

pay local launch --cluster card

Start frontend

npm install && npm run compile
npm run start:dev

Make a create payment request to the locally running Public API app, and visit the next_url with the host changed to http://localhost:3000.

Debug using Visual Studio Code

• In VSCode, go to the Debug view (on MacOS, use shortcut CMD + shift + D).
• From the Run toolbar, select tne launch config Frontend.
• Add breakpoints to any file you want to debug - click in the left hand column and a red dot will appear.
• Press The green play button (F5 MacOS):
  • This will run the app in debug mode.
  • Uses nodemon so it will automatically restart on code changes.

Watching for changes

You shouldn’t need to restart the app to see changes you make.

We use nodemon which watches for changes to files and restarts the node process.

If you’re making changes to client-side JS or Sass files (anything within /assets/) then running npm run watch-live-reload will watch for changes and recompile. Nodemon does not do anything here as that’s not necessary. If you install the livereload browser plugin then it will refresh your page once the assets have been compiled to the /public folder.

Running tests

To run mocha tests

npm run compile && npm test

Debug tests using Visual Studio Code

IMPORTANT NOTE - some tests do not work in debug mode

• Some integration tests do not work in debug mode. This is because the tests are dependent on other tests running before hand.
• Nevertheless, it is still useful to debug tests that do work in debug mode.

Run tests in debug mode

• In VSCode, go to the Debug view (on MacOS, use shortcut CMD + shift + D).
• From the Run toolbar, select the launch config you want to run:
  • Mocha All - runs all tests.
  • Mocha Current File - only run currently open test file.
• Add breakpoints to any file you want to debug - click in the left hand column and a red dot will appear.
• Press The green play button or F5.

To run cypress tests

Run in two separate terminals:

1. npm run cypress:server

   This runs both the Cypress server and Mountebank which is the virtualisation server used for stubbing out external API calls.

2. Either:

• npm run cypress:test to run headless
• npm run cypress:test-headed to run headed

Key environment variables

Licence

MIT License

Responsible Disclosure

GOV.UK Pay aims to stay secure for everyone. If you are a security researcher and have discovered a security vulnerability in this code, we appreciate your help in disclosing it to us in a responsible manner. We will give appropriate credit to those reporting confirmed issues. Please e-mail [email protected] with details of any issue you find, we aim to reply quickly.