strong-config/node

Create 'example' folder to speed up local development

Closed this issue · 2 comments

chapati23 commented

tl;dr

Create an example folder that is its own self-contained app using @strong-config/node to allow faster iteration during development.

The Problem

Currently, when we want to try out changes on real schemas or config files we have three options:

  1. Switch to another app that's already using strong-config such as our internal api-gateway
    • This is bad because it's tightly coupled with our own infra and external contributors don't have that option.
    • It's also inconvenient in terms of DX to have to constantly switch between two repos just to try out some changes
  2. Rely solely on tests
    • Obviously we should always write tests and our tests should be robus
    • But sometimes you just want to try things out quickly, e.g. see how a certain code change affects the transformation of schema.json into TypeScript and always having to write a test for this is very cumbersome
  3. Create a new app that uses @strong-config/node
    • This is of course possible but also very repetitive
    • Have to repeat various steps every time (e.g. create folder, yarn init, yarn add, manually write schema file, config files...)

The Proposed Solution

Create an example folder inside this repo that:

  • Has one (or several) example schema.json to quickly try out how our code behaves in various scenarios
  • Has several example config files to quickly try out how our code behaves in various scenarios

In our package.json, we will then create the following yarn tasks:

  • yarn dev:load $env - Load a config file. Translate it into TypeScript. Log the result to the console.
  • yarn dev:load:watch $env - Same as above, but with hot-reloading on every file change via nodemon
  • yarn dev:validate $env validates a config yaml against a schema
  • yarn dev:validate:watch $env - Same as above, but with hot-reloading on every file change via nodemon
  • [BONUS] yarn dev:encrypt $env - Encrypts a config yaml
  • [BONUS] yarn dev:decrypt $env - Decrypts a config yaml
mohoff commented

Sounds good! I wouldn't make it an entire node app though. Think something like

example/
    /config
       development.yaml
       production.yaml
    schema.json

is sufficient for now when I think about the development process. The rest we can control with yarn tasks:

  • yarn dev:load : Uses lib/index.js as entry point and invokes the load function on example/ data
  • yarn dev:validate : Uses lib/index.js as entry point and invokes the validate function on example/ data
  • Future: yarn dev:encrypt/decrypt/watch as you suggested

Then for testing, it's very fast to break a config or the schema and call the yarn dev:* commands again.

For me, the self-contained app makes much sense for a standalone @strong-config/example porject though.

chapati23 commented

ok, sounds good, have updated the issue to reflect that we're starting with a simple example folder that isn't a full node app