Digital service to support the Ivory Act.

The default values will be used if the environment variables are missing or commented out.

Node v14.x

Redis

First install the dependencies & build the application using:

$ npm install

Currently this will just build the govuk-frontend sass and create a default .env file if one doesn't already exist. But may be extended to include other build tasks as needed (e.g. client-side js using browserify or webpack etc.)

If installing on a Windows machine you may encounter an error when running $ npm install relating to your OS not being able to run the Bash scripts which are part of the installation. Should you have this problem first ensure that you have installed Git for Windows. Then run the command $ npm config set script-shell %userprofile%\cmder\vendor\git-for-windows\bin\bash followed by $ npm install.

Now the application is ready to run:

$ npm start or $ node index.js

$ npm run docker or $ npm run docker:build followed by $ npm run docker:run

Here's the default structure for your project files.

• bin (build tasks)
• client (client js/sass code)
• server
  • plugins
  • public (This folder is publicly served)
    • static (Put all static assets in here)
    • build (This contains the build output files (js/css etc.) and is not checked-in)
  • routes
  • services
  • views
  • config.js
  • index.js (Exports a function that creates a server)
• test
• README.md
• index.js (startup server)

The configuration file for the server is found at server/config.js. This is where to put any config and all config should be read from the environment. The final config object should be validated using joi and the application should not start otherwise.

A table of environment variables should be maintained in this README.

hapi has a powerful plugin system and all server code should be loaded in a plugin.

Plugins live in the server/plugins directory.

The good and good-console plugins are included and configured in server/plugins/logging

The logging plugin is only registered in when NODE_ENV=development.

Error logging for production should use errbit.

The vison plugin is used for template rendering support.

The template engine used in nunjucks inline with the GDS Design System with support for view caching, layouts, partials and helpers.

The Inert plugin is used for static file and directory handling in hapi.js. Put all static assets in server/public/static.

Any build output should write to server/public/build. This path is in the .gitignore and is therefore not checked into source control.

Incoming requests are handled by the server via routes. Each route describes an HTTP endpoint with a path, method, and other properties.

Routes are found in the server/routes directory and loaded using the server/plugins/router.js plugin.

Hapi supports registering routes individually or in a batch. Each route file can therefore export a single route object or an array of route objects.

A single route looks like this:

{
  method: 'GET',
  path: '/hello-world',
  options: {
    handler: (request, h) => {
      return 'hello world'
    }
  }
}

There are lots of route options, here's the documentation on hapi routes

Build tasks are created using simple shell scripts or node.js programs. The default ones are found in the bin directory.

The task runner is simply npm using npm-scripts.

The predefined tasks are:

• npm start (Runs the application)
• npm run build (Runs all build sub-tasks)
• npm run build:css (Builds the client-side sass)
• npm run docker (Runs all Docker sub-tasks)
• npm run docker:build (Builds the application in a Docker container)
• npm run docker:run (Runs the application in the Docker container)
• npm run lint (Runs the lint task using standard.js)
• npm run unit-test (Runs the lab tests in the /test folder)
• npm test (Runs the lint task then the unit-tests)

lab and code are used for unit testing.

See the /test folder for more information.

standard.js is used to lint both the server-side and client-side javascript code.

It's defined as a build task and can be run using npm run lint.