Digital Marketplace Buyer Frontend

Frontend application for the Digital Marketplace.

Python app, based on the Flask framework

This app contains:

Digital Marketplace's public pages
the G-Cloud buyer journey

Quickstart

It's recommended to use the DM Runner tool, which will install and run the app as part of the full suite of apps.

If you want to run the app as a stand-alone process, clone the repo then run:

make run-all

This command will install dependencies and start the app.

By default, the app will be served at http://127.0.0.1:5002. This can be changed by setting the DM_BUYER_PORT environment variable.

API dependencies

(If you are using DM Runner you can skip this section.)

The Buyer Frontend app requires access to both the API app (for service pages) and to the search API app (for search results). The location and access tokens for these services is set with environment variables in config.py.

For development, you can either point the environment variables to use the preview environment's API and Search API boxes, or use local API instances if you have them running:

export DM_DATA_API_URL=http://localhost:5000
export DM_DATA_API_AUTH_TOKEN=<auth_token_accepted_by_api>
export DM_SEARCH_API_URL=http://localhost:5009
export DM_SEARCH_API_AUTH_TOKEN=<auth_token_accepted_by_search_api>

Where DM_DATA_API_AUTH_TOKEN is a token accepted by the Data API instance pointed to by DM_API_URL, and DM_SEARCH_API_AUTH_TOKEN is a token accepted by the Search API instance pointed to by DM_SEARCH_API_URL.

Testing

Run the full test suite:

make test

To only run the Python or Javascript tests:

make test-python
make test-javascript

To run the flake8 linter:

make test-flake8

Updating Python dependencies

requirements.txt file is generated from the requirements.in in order to pin versions of all nested dependencies. If requirements.in has been changed (or we want to update the unpinned nested dependencies) requirements.txt should be regenerated with

make freeze-requirements

requirements.txt should be committed alongside requirements.in changes.

Frontend assets

Front-end code (both development and production) is compiled using Node and Gulp.

Requirements

You need Node (try to install the version we use in production - see the base docker image).

To check the version you're running, type:

node --version

Frontend tasks

npm is used for all frontend build tasks. The commands available are:

npm run frontend-build:development (compile the frontend files for development)
npm run frontend-build:production (compile the frontend files for production)
npm run frontend-build:watch (watch all frontend+framework files & rebuild when anything changes)

Updating NPM dependencies

Update the relevant version numbers in package.json, then run

npm install

Commit the changes to package.json and package-lock.json.

You can also run npm audit fix to make minor updates to package-lock.json.

Contributing

This repository is maintained by the Digital Marketplace team at the Crown Commercial Service.

If you have a suggestion for improvement, please raise an issue on this repo.

Reporting Vulnerabilities

If you have discovered a security vulnerability in this code, we appreciate your help in disclosing it to us in a responsible manner.

Please follow the CCS vulnerability reporting steps, giving details of any issue you find. Appropriate credit will be given to those reporting confirmed issues.

Licence

Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT License. This covers both the codebase and any sample code in the documentation.