clintmorgan/surf repository overview

⁠Surfing CI-fari

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⁠Application

Meet surfbot, the bot that surfs the web so you don't have to. Tell it about some websites, and a bot will visit them for you. Important bits of the website are presented in a web ui as well as a (slack) chatbot.

⁠Dev guide

A sweet nodejs stack using mongo, react, socket.io, and botkit. Infrastructure is managed with docker and make.

Pretty basic functionality, but built with some tech bling:

• Real time updates with websockets
• A chat interface (slack)
• Isomorphic javascript: same web client used in server and browser

Developer sanity is achieved via:

• Leveraging modern javascript (ES6)
• Efficient hot-swapping for live development cycles
• Reproducible, isolated environments for dev and testing
• CI practices (linting, unit tests, and functional verification)

⁠Quickstart

• Install Docker
• Build, bring up dev environment make dev

OR

• Install Nodejs, mongo, selenium, chrome, and ...
• Build with npm install
• Run with npm run dev

⁠Make + Docker

Simple Makefiles call out to Docker and express the dependencies. Incremental-build optimizations are managed by docker/docker-compose. This combination enables to run a parallel build with make -j

• download/build base images (nodejs, mongo, webdriver)
• build server image
• lint the source
• run unit tests
• startup FVT environment with our server plus mongo and webdriver
• test REST API
• test web UI
• test chat UI

NOTES:

• seem to leak disk with dev process. Using make docker-clean to fix

⁠React

Setup

• prefer functional abstractions
• Views consist of: components and containers:
• components are pure functions props -> DOM
• containers group components mapping state -> props

Evaluation

• Functional UI programming is great (Tony the tiger)!
• views, reducers can be pure functions
• most side-effects (AJAX) happens in actions
• enforcing a separation between view and state manipulation is "firm but fair"
• JSX seems nice

⁠Chat UX

Bots test bots! FVT by using another bot to drive conversation with our chat UX bot

Note: running chat FVT tests require some configuration:

• Create two bots in your team and export the tokens in SLACK_TOKEN and TEST_SLACK_TOKEN
• create a room called "testing"
• invite both bots to the room