ontime/DEVELOPMENT.md

GETTING STARTED

Ontime consists of 3 distinct parts

• client: A React app for Ontime's UI and web clients
• electron: An electron app which facilitates the cross-platform distribution of Ontime
• server: A node application which handles the domains services and integrations

The steps below will assume you have locally installed the necessary dependencies. Other dependencies will be installed as part of the setup

• node (~20)
• pnpm (~9)
• docker (only necessary to run and build docker images)

LOCAL DEVELOPMENT

The electron app is only necessary to distribute an installable version of the app and is not required for local development. Locally, we would need to run both the React client and the node.js server in development mode

From the project root, run the following commands

• Install the project dependencies by running pnpm i
• Run dev mode by running turbo dev

Debugging backend

To debug backend code in Node.js:

• Open two separate terminals and navigate to the apps/client and apps/server directories.
• In each terminal, run the command pnpm dev to start the development servers for both the client and server applications.
• If you need to set breakpoints and inspect the code execution, enable Node.js inspect mode by running pnpm dev:inspect.

TESTING

Generally we have 2 types of tests.

• Unit tests for functions that contain business logic
• End-to-end tests for core features

Unit tests

Unit tests are contained in mostly all the apps and packages (client, server and utils)

You can run unit tests by running turbo turbo test:pipeline from the project root. This will run all tests and close test runner.

Alternatively you can navigate to an app or project and run pnpm test to run those tests in watch mode

E2E tests

E2E tests are in a separate package. On running, playwright will spin up an instance of the webserver to test against These tests also run against a separate version of the DB (test-db)

Before running the E2E, you should first build the project with pnpm build:local.

You can run playwright tests from project root with pnpm e2e

When writing tests, it can be handy to run playwright in interactive mode with pnpm e2e:i. You would need to manually start the webserver with pnpm dev:server

Some other useful commands

• pnpm e2e --ui open playwright UI
• pnpm e2e --headed run tests with a visible browser window

CREATE AN INSTALLABLE FILE (Windows | MacOS | Linux)

Ontime uses Electron to distribute the application. You can generate a distribution for your OS by running the following steps.

From the project root, run the following commands

• Install the project dependencies by running pnpm i
• Build the UI and server by running turbo build:electron
• Create the package by running turbo dist-win, turbo dist-mac or turbo dist-linux

The build distribution assets will be at .apps/electron/dist

Note: The MacOS build will only work in CI, locally it will fail due to notarisation issues. Use the turbo dist-mac:local command to build a MacOS distribution locally.

DOCKER

Ontime provides a docker-compose file to aid with building and running docker images. While it should allow for a generic setup, it might need to be modified to fit your infrastructure.

From the project root, run the following commands

• Build docker image from by running docker build -t getontime/ontime
• Run docker image from compose by running docker-compose up -d

Other useful commands

• List running processes by running docker ps
• Kill running process by running docker kill <process-id>

General Info

APP Building

We build the app from app.js for almost all applications. The output file will still be named index.cjs. This is because of Electron. Building the app from index.ts only applies for applications that don't use electron. index.ts will take over the initialization of the server and UI when electron isn't present.