Benji Notes

New NPM Packages

I installed axios to send the form data to our backend, i.e. 'npm install --s axios'.

Client Updates

Client Styles

I created a new file called product-generator.css in src/client/styles to style the Product Generation form.

In src/client/js/app.js, I imported the new css file.

I edited src/client/styles/product.css to style the 'Show Product JSON' button.

Client Javascript

In src/client/js/home.js, I wrote logic to grab form data, send the data to the backend, and re-direct the client URL after the server returns the URL for the newly generated product.

In src/client/js/product.js, I wrote logic to register the 'Show Product JSON' button click, and display the hidden product data returned from the server.

Client Routing

I edited the constructor of src/client/js/router.js to add a "random" subdomain whenever anyone visits the website without a subdomain. We need to change the baseURLto the URL of the production website.

Server Updates

Server Routing

In src/server/routes, I edited index.js and added create-product.js and verification.js.

verification.js offers the HTML for Merchant Center's web crawlers to verify this is a valid website.
create-product.js receives the client product data, generates a new product, and submits it to the database (database submission still needs to be done).

I edited src/server/routes/router.js to import and enable the verification and create-product routes.

I placed the verification route before the product :id wildcard route to ensure the verification route works.
I added the '*' wildcard to all routes. I hope that will work for subdomains, however we need to test in production. We still need to add the wildcard to the regular expression for index.html

I edited src/server/routes/index.js to have an empty array for homeCategories and homeProducts. Comment out my code and comment in the original code to get the website to work in production.

Server-side HTML

In src/server/services/templates/partials, I added home-add-product.hbs to generate the HTML to create a new product.

In src/server/services/templates/views, I edited index.hbs to add the new home-add-product partial to the end of the page.

In src/server/services/templates/views, I edited product.hbs to add the 'Show Product JSON' button and the pre tag to display the Content API JSON data.

Online store PWA sample

This sample demonstrates best practices for e-commerce websites.

It also demonstrates some useful features enabled by new technologies and APIs on the web.

Development

Create a fork of the original project GoogleChromeLabs/sample-pie-shop and clone to your development environment.

Install dependencies

Change to the top level project directory run the following:

cd sample-pie-shop
npm ci

Note: This will install the dependencies as per the package-lock.json whereas npm install will update them. If you need to update the dependencies, submit the updated package-lock.json as a new PR.

Run the development server

The project uses Firebase Cloud Firestore for product data. You will need to create a project and download the JSON configuration for the Admin SDK. You can do this in the Firebase console using the Generate new private key button. Save this to src/data/firebase-admin-key.json.

The start:dev target will build the site and serve it locally while watching for any changes. Once the script completes the initial build, the site should be available at localhost:3000.

npm run start:dev

Note: You can override the default location for the config file by specifying a path in the FB_KEYS environment variable.

FB_KEYS=/path/to/alternative-key.json npm run start:dev

Check package.json for the other build targets.

Import data to the database

Sample data for products, product categories and homepage content is stored as JSON in the /src/data directory.

You can import (upload) this data to your remote Firestore database by running the following Node scripts from the /tools directory:

cd tools
node --experimental-modules import_home.mjs
node --experimental-modules import_products.mjs

This project uses ECMAScript Modules, which currently require the --experimental-modules flag.

Check your version of Node using node -v and update to the LTS or Current version if necessary. The import code above has been tested in versions 10.15.3 and 11.14.0.

Create a search index from your own data

This demo uses the Algolia search engine. This is free for open source projects with up to 100k records and 200k operations monthly.

The search functionality provided by this sample will work as-is for the product data in /src/data/products.json. In other words, if you're happy to use the sample product data as it is, you don't need to do anything!

However, if you want to use different product data, you will need to create your own Algolia application, then build a search index from your data. The index.js application in the /tools/algolia directory enables you to create an Algolia search index from a Firebase data source. It can also be used to monitor updates to your data, and update the Algolia search index in response.

Follow these steps to build a search index if you want to use your own data:

Follow the Algolia tutorial to create a search application.
Follow the tutorial instructions to create a .env configuration file in the /tools/algolia directory.
Run node index.js in the same directory to get data from Firebase and create the index for the Algolia app.
Update the APP_ID (Algolia app) and API_KEY (search key) values in /src/services/algolia.js.

Images

Images are served from Cloudinary and displayed responsively using the srcset and sizes attributes in combination with lazy-img for lazy loading.

Deploying

See DEPLOY.md.

Brothman/sample-pie-shop