FormSG is a form builder application built, open sourced and maintained by the Open Government Products team of the Singapore Government Technology Agency to digitise paper processes.
Notable features include:
- 19 different form field types, including attachments, tables, email and mobile
- Verified email and mobile phone fields via integrations with Twilio and AWS SES
- Automatic emailing of submissions for forms built with Email Mode
- End-to-end encryption for forms built with Storage Mode
- (Singapore government agencies only) Citizen authentication with SingPass
- (Singapore government agencies only) Corporate authentication with CorpPass
- (Singapore government agencies only) Automatic prefill of verified data with MyInfo
- Webhooks functionality via the official FormSG JavaScript SDK and contributor-supported FormSG Ruby SDK
The current product roadmap includes:
- (in progress) Frontend rewrite from AngularJS to React
- Enabling payments on forms
- Electronic signatures
- Notifications to form admins for Storage mode submissions
- Integration with vault.gov.sg
Install docker and docker-compose.
Run npm install
in root directory to install relevant npm packages.
If you are on Mac OS X, you may want to allow Docker to use more RAM (minimum of 4GB) by clicking on the Docker icon on the toolbar, clicking on the "Preferences" menu item, then clicking on the "Resources" link on the left.
If you are on macOS Monetery or higher, port 5000 is now used by the system. This conflicts with the default port used by the backend. You could either:
- Update the backend ports in these environment variables:
Dockerfile.development
- Update exposed port
docker-compose.yml
- Introduce a new env var
PORT
- Update
APP_URL
- Introduce a new env var
frontend/package.json
- Update the proxy URL
- Disable control center
Run the following shell command to build the Docker image from scratch. This will usually take 10 or so minutes. This command runs the backend services specified under docker-compose.yml and the React frontend on the native host.
npm run dev
After the Docker image has finished building, the React application can be accessed at localhost:3000. The backend API server can be accessed at localhost:5001.
If there are no dependency changes in package.json
or changes in the
src/app/server.ts
file, you can run
docker-compose up
which does not rebuild the Docker image from scratch. This command usually only takes ~15 seconds to finish starting up the image.
Run npm install
as per usual.
For backend, run
docker-compose up --build --renew-anon-volumes
which will rebuild the backend Docker image and not reuse the existing node_modules volume.
As frontend project is currently not using Docker, no other steps are required.
We use MailDev to access emails in the development environment. The MailDev UI can be accessed at localhost:1080 when the Docker container runs.
Docker-compose looks at various places for environment variables to inject into the containers. The following is the order of priority:
- Compose file
- Shell environment variables
- Environment file
- Dockerfile
FormSG requires some environment variables to function. More information about the required environment variables are in DEPLOYMENT_SETUP.md.
We provide a .template-env
file with the secrets blanked out. You can copy and
paste the variables described into a self-created .env
file, replacing the
required values with your own.
You can consult TROUBLESHOOTING.md for common issues that developers face and how to resolve them.
The docker environment has not been configured to run tests. Thus, you will need to follow the following local build guide to get tests running locally.
The team uses macOS for development.
Make you sure have the following node version & package manager on your machine:
"node": ">=18.12.1"
"npm": ">=8.19.2"
"mongo": ">=4.0.0"
Run
nvm install 14
npm install
pip install "localstack[full]"
to install node modules and Localstack locally to be able to run tests. Note that
localstack[full]
is only compatible with Python 3.7 and above.
npm run test
will build the backend and run both our backend and frontend unit tests. The tests are located at
tests/unit/frontend
and
tests/unit/backend
.
If the backend is already built, you can run
npm run test-ci
npm run test-e2e
will build both the frontend and backend then run our end-to-end tests. The tests are located at tests/end-to-end
. You will need to stop the Docker dev container to be able to run the end-to-end tests.
If you do not need to rebuild the frontend and backend, you can run
npm run test-e2e-ci
The architecture overview is here.
Scripts for common tasks in MongoDB can be found here.
We welcome all contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements, and ideas to code open sourced by the Government Technology Agency of Singapore. Contributors should read CONTRIBUTING.md and will also be asked to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to ensure that everybody is free to use their contributions.
Please contact FormSG (support@form.gov.sg) for any details.
FormSG acknowledges the work done by Arielle Baldwynn to build and maintain TellForm, on which FormSG is based.
Contributions have also been made by:
@RyanAngJY
@jeantanzy
@pregnantboy
@namnguyen08
@zioul123
@JoelWee
@limli
@tankevan