Frontend

The Guardian website frontend.

Getting started for new developers

Frontend is a set of Play Framework 2 Scala applications.

To start the play development environment, run the provided sbt011 script in the source tree root. This starts the Play Framework console.

Configuration

You'll need a config file in /etc/gu/install_vars as follows :-

STAGE=DEV
INT_SERVICE_DOMAIN=gudev.gnl
EXT_SERVICE_DOMAIN=

And one for each application in ~/.gu, for example ~/.gu/frontend-article.properties :-

content.api.key=xxx
content.api.host=http://xxx.guardianapis.com/api

Get the correct key and host from another developer on the project.

Running

Change to the project of interest using the project <name> command. Then use the compile command to compile the software, test to execute test suites.

Start the Play application locally using run at the console. You can inspect it at http://localhost:9000. Play supports recompilation on browser refresh so you can edit the code in your IDE and F5 refresh to see your changes.

To use in Eclipse, use the eclipsify command. This will create Eclipse project and settings files which can be imported using the Import Existing Project options in Eclipse.

To use in IntelliJ, use the gen-idea command from the. This will create IntelliJ project directories. The source tree can be opened directly as a project in IntelliJ.

Further information on using the Play console is available here.

Virtualisation

Virtualisation provides for robust development environments and a controlled system dependency solution. See the instructions in README.vagrant.md for using Vagrant virtualisation with this project.

Endpoints

The available endpoints are listed in conf/routes of each application and typically include:

/management: Operations support as per standard webapp guidelines. See guardian-management.
/pages/<path>: Serve the Guardian URL at <path> if supported by this application.
/assets/<file>: A convenience for DEV machines. Assets are CDNed in PROD and would not be available on DEV.
/<path>: A synonym for /pages/<path> as a convenience for DEV machines.

Deploying

Deployment uses the Magenta library.

No Proxy Build

Invoke sbt011 with a --no-proxy parameter to directly download artifacts.

Additional Documentation

Further documentation notes and useful items can be found in dev.

mmoulou/frontend