Codebrag frontend application project codebrag-ui is completely decoupled from server exposing JSON API. It uses nodejs based build tool called Grunt.js which is well suited for frontend application development. Main project exposing server API is located in codebrag-rest.
To work with codebrag-ui you need to have node installed in version 0.10.13 or newer. Make sure you have both node and npm commands available on PATH.
If this is your first attempt to run codebrag-ui, please go to codebrag-ui project and run
npm install
This will install all required dependencies for this project.
It is adised to install Grunt.js globally. In order to do that, please run
npm install -g grunt-cli
This will install grunt command globally and make it available. Be sure to have NPM binaries on PATH. You may need to add '/usr/local/share/npm/bin/' to your PATH if you have NPM installed via Homebrew.
Then you can use grunt command as described below.
If you don't want to install Grunt.js locally, Codebrag has it already in dependencies, so doing npm install as described above should be enough. The only drawback is that in this mode grunt will not be available on your PATH. To run grunt from local installation you should be in codebrag-ui project and run it via
./node_modules/.bin/grunt
Build system exposes several tasks that can be run. Gruntfile.js contains all the build configuration. Run it with grunt <task> if you have grunt installed globally or via ./node_modules/.bin/grunt <task> if installed locally.
The most important tasks exposed are:
grunt servergrunt server:distgrunt buildgrunt testgrunt autotest
This task serves Codebrag application on port 9090 on localhost. Your default browser should open at this location. All requests to API for data will be proxied to port 8080 when it expects backend server to be run.
Grunt will watch for any change in frontend files (templates, js files, styles) and every change is automatically compiled (if necessary) and browser is automatically refreshed to apply changes. No need to refresh it by hand.
*** Note: if you have LiveReload extension enabled in you browser, please disable it so that it doesn't interfere with build one ***
In this task all scripts are serverd in non-concatenated and non-minified version from their original locations (if possible).
This task is similar to the one above with one difference: it preprocessess all the files in order to create distribution (it currently includes concatenation of scripts files), runs tests and serves application from this freshly baked distribution version. This server's version doesn't watch for file changes.
It runs all tests and builds everything to as distribution version to dist directory. It doesn't fire up server.
It simply tests the build one time. Tests are run with Karma runner using PhantomJS as default browser. Whole tests configuration is in karma-config.js file in codebrag-ui project.
This task runs tests and watches for changes in files. When change is detected it runs tests automatically. This is especially helpful in hard-development mode.
Nothing changed in distribution and deployment procedure. During fat-jar creation. Grunt task grunt build is run and distribution version of frontend is packaged up in this jar as if it was regular java web application.