The DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

The Human Layer of the Stack

Introduction and Contribution Guideline

Welcome to the dev.to codebase. We are so excited to have you. Most importantly, all contributors must abide by the code of conduct.

With your help, we can build out the DEV Community platform to be more stable and better serve the users. The platform is built on Ruby on Rails. When in doubt, try to do things "The Rails Way", but it is an evolving codebase and we will learn from all new contributions in order to evolve.

Before we can make the codebase fully open source, we must ensure we discover any possible vulnerabilities that could be exposed by eyes on the code, but in the long run we think that openness can do nothing but help in this way.

How to contribute

When in doubt, ask! We are doing this for the first time and we may not be clear about everything. Creating an issue to ask about how to do something in the open is a great decision. We will try to create clear issues, but communication is the most important thing and it's hard! You may communicate through a pull request. It's a fine approach, but it could result in going down the wrong path. The earlier we talk about something the better.

Refactoring code, e.g. improving the code without modifying the behavior is an area that can probably be done based on intuition and may not require much communication to be merged.

Fixing bugs may also not require a lot of communication, but the more the better. Please surround bug fixes with ample tests. Bugs are magnets for other bugs. Write tests near bugs!

Building features is the area which will require the most communication and/or negotiation. Every feature is subjective and open for debate. Let's talk about the features!

Clean code with tests

Even though some of the existing code is poorly written or not tested as well as it could be, we have much more scrutiny for these things going forward, as the transition from team-only development to open development makes clean code more important than ever in order to avoid communication breakdown. Good luck writing the best code of your life!

Non-code contributions

Improving documentation and wikis is very valuable, as is participating in any discussions about approaches or features.

The bottom line

If a process could be improved, don't hesitate to bring it up, but there are always tradeoffs and we are humans. Mistakes happen and opinions may not always line up. Shaming anyone trying to contribute is not allowed.

Getting Started

Prerequisite

• Ruby: we recommend using rbenv to install the Ruby version listed on the badge.
• Bundler: gem install bundler
• Foreman: gem install foreman
• Yarn: use brew install yarn to install yarn. It will also install node if you don't already have it.
• PostgresSQL: the easiest way to get started with this is to use Postgres.app.

Installation steps

1. git clone git@github.com:thepracticaldev/dev.to_core.git
2. bundle install
3. bin/yarn
4. bin/setup
5. Set up your environment variables/secrets
   • Create a config/application.yml file to store development secrets. This is a personal file that is ignored in git.
   • Copy config/sample_application.yml in order to create a valid application.yml
   • You'll need to get your own free API keys for a few services. Follow this wiki to get them.
   • If you are missing ENV variables on bootup, _env_checker.rb will let you know. If you add or remove ENV vars to the project, you must also modify this file before they can be merged. The wiki above should handle all the necessary keys for basic development.

Starting the application

We're mostly a Rails app, with a bit of Webpack sprinkled in. For most cases, simply running bin/rails server will do. If you're working with Webpack though, you'll need to run the following:

• Run bin/startup to start the server, Webpack, and our job runner delayed_job. bin/startup runs foreman start -f Procfile.dev under the hood.
• alias start="bin/startup" makes this even faster. 😊
• If you're using pry for debugging in Rails, note that using foreman and pry together works, but it's not as clean as bin/rails server.

Here are some singleton commands you may need, usually in a separate instance/tab of your shell.

• Running the job server (if using bin/rails server) -- this is for mostly for notifications and emails: bin/rails jobs:work
• Clearing jobs (in case you don't want to wait for the backlog of jobs): bin/rails jobs:clear

Current gotchas: potential environment issues with external services need to be worked out.

🔑 Key App tech/services

• We use Puma for the server
• We rely heavily on edge caching with Fastly
• We use Cloudinary for image manipulation/serving
• We use Keen for event storage
• We use Airbrake for error monitoring
• We use Timber for logging
• We use Delayed Job for background workers
• We use Algolia for search
• We use Redcarpet/Rouge for Markdown
• We use Carrierwave/Fog/AWS S3 for image upload/storage
• We use a modified version of InstantClick instead of Turbolinks
• We are hosted on Heroku
• We use Heroku scheduler for scheduled jobs (default)
• We use Sendgrid for API-triggered mailing
• We use Mailchimp for marketing/outreach emails
• We use Figaro for app configuration.
• We use CounterCulture to keep track of association counts (counter caches)
• We use Rolify for role management.
• We use Pundit for authorization.
• We use Service Workers to proxy traffic

There's more, but that's a decent overview of the key need-to-knows.

Workflow Suggestion

We use Spring and it is already included in the project.

1. Use the provided bin stubs to automatically start Spring, i.e. bin/rails server, bin/rspec spec/models/, bin/rake db:migrate.
2. If Spring isn't picking up on new changes, use spring stop. For example, Spring should always be restarted if there's a change in environment key.
3. Check Spring's status whenever with spring status.

Caveat: bin/rspec is not equipped with Spring because it affect Simplecov's result. Instead use bin/spring rspec.

Style Guide

This project follows Bbatsov's Ruby Style Guide, using Rubocop along with Rubocop-Rspec as the code analyzer. If you have Rubocop installed with your text editor of choice, you should be up and running. Settings can be edited in .rubocop.yml.

For Javascript, we follow Airbnb's JS Style Guide, using ESLint and prettier. If you have ESLint installed with your text editor of choice, you should be up and running.

When commits are made, a git precommit hook runs via husky and lint-staged on front-end code that will run eslint and prettier on your code before committing it. If there are linting errors and eslint isn't able to automatically fix it, the commit will not happen. You will need to fix the issue manually then attempt to commit again.

Note: if you've already installed the husky package at least once (used for precommit npm script), you will need to run yarn --force or npm install --no-cache. For some reason the post-install script of husky does not run, when the package is pulled from yarn's or npm's cache. This is not husky specific, but rather a cached package specific issue.

Testing

The following technologies are used for testing:

• Rspec
• Capybara with selenium-webdriver
  • chromedriver-helper for standard JS testing.
• rack_session_access
• Warden
• guard-rspec for automated testing

When should I use login_via_session_as(:user) vs login_as(:user)?

• login_as(:user) uses Warden's stubbing actions to make the application think that a user is signed in but without all of the overhead of actually signing them in. Recommended for view test.
• login_via_session_as(:user) uses rack_session_access to modify application's session. It is integrated with Devise so current_user won't be nil. Recommended for feature test.

Previewing emails in development

You can modify the test in /test/mailers/previews You can view the previews at (for example) http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/notify_mailer/new_reply_email

How to contribute (Internal)

1. Clone the project locally.
2. Create a branch for each separate piece of work.
3. Do the work and write good commit messages.

• If your work includes adding a new environment variable, make sure you update _env_checker.rb.

4. Push your branch up to this repository.
5. Create a new pull-reqest.
6. After the pull-request is approved and merged, delete your branch on github.

Avoid pushing spike(test) branches up to the main repository. If you must, push the spike branches up to a forked repository.

Branch Policies

Branch naming convention

Name the branch in the following manner. <your-name>/<type>/<github issue# (if there's one)>-<name>

Examples

ben/feature/renderer-cookies
jess/hotfix/dockerfile-base-image
andy-mac/issue/#132-broken-link

Pull request guideline

• Keep the pull request small; a pull request should try it's very best to address only a single concern.
• Make sure all the tests pass and add additional tests for the code you submit.
• Document your reasoning behind the changes. Explain why you wrote the code in the way you did, not what it does.
• If there's an existing issue related to the pull request, reference to it. More info here

Please note that we squash all pull request. After a pull request is approved, we will remove the branch the PR is on unless you state it otherwise

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment

We are using Codeship for CI and CD. Codeship will run a build (in isolated environment for testing) for every push to this repository. Keep in mind that a passing-build does not necessarily mean the project won't run into any issues. Strive to write good tests for any chunk of code you wish to contribute. Only pushes to the deployment branch will evoke the CD portion of Codeship after CI passes. Our test suite is not perfect and sometimes a re-rerun is needed.

Skipping CI build (Not recommended)

If your changes are minor (i.e. updating README), you can skip CI by adding --skip-ci to your commit message. More info here.

CodeClimate and Simplecov

We are using CodeClimate to track code quality and code coverage. Codeclimate will grade the quality of the code of every PR but not the entirety of the project. If you feel that the current linting rule is unreasonable, feel free to submit a separate PR to change it. Fix any errors that Codeclimate provides and strive to leave code better than you found it.

Simplecov is a gem that is tracking the coverage of our test suite. Codeship will upload Simplecov data to CodeClimate. We are still in the early stage of using it so it may not provide an accurate measurement our of codebase.

Using simplecov locally

1. Run bundle exec rspec spec or bin/rspec spec. You can run rspec on the whole project or a single file.
2. After rspec is complete, open index.html within the coverage folder to view code coverages.

Run bin/rspecov to do all of this in one step