Manchester Homelessness Charter

The website codebase for charter.streetsupport.net.

Build Status

• develop -
• staging -
• release -

Git Branching

Please work in the develop branch first, and use feature branches for significant pieces of work. Once the feature is completed, submit a pull request into develop. Travis CI automatically builds on each commit to develop, uat and release. The release branch automatically builds to: http://charter.streetsupport.net.

Install

• Install Node 8 LTS,
• Run in Terminal: npm i gulp-cli -g (Gulp does not need to be installed globally),
• In your command line terminal, navigate to the street support project folder,
• Run: npm i (if you receive errors pertaining to snyk - most likely on Windows - follow these instructions.

See https://github.com/fephil/garrus for more information about the Frontend workflow.

Optional Installs

In your editor of choice, the following plugins are recommended but not required. Note the plugin names might be slightly different depending on your editor.

• editorconfig,
• tabs-to-spaces,
• linter,
• linter-handlebars,
• linter-js-standard,
• linter-stylelint.

Usage

Run these tasks in your command line Terminal:

gulp [--production] [--debug]

gulp deploy [--production] [--debug]

gulp auditcode

• The gulp task builds the website, watches for changes and starts up a sever,
• The gulp deploy task builds the website without watching for changes or running the server,
• The gulp auditcode task runs various linting on the project source files,
• The gulp jsdev task only checks and builds javascript with associated tests,
• The --production flag builds minified assets with no sourcemaps,
• The --debug flag shows the files being created in each task (if the task has a pipe).

Development

Workflow

On running the default gulp task from the terminal, it will run tests and linting, build the site into the /_dist/ directory, and then launch in your default browser. As you edit files in the /src/ directory, the site will refresh automatically.

Pages

Each page of the site is found under the /pages/ directory. Each page is represented by a handlebars file index.hbs, in a directory named after the page's url. In each .hbs file, meta data is entered to define the page:

• title: the page's title tag
• description: the page's meta description
• layout: the master layout file (found in /layouts/)
• permalink: ???
• jsBundle: the js bundle that will be loaded into the page. Bundles are defined in /webpack.config.js and each one points to a js file in /src/js/
• section: the top level navigation item this page belongs to. See /src/scss/modules/_variables.scss for list of sections
• page: the navigation item for this page. See /src/scss/modules/_variables.scss for list of pages
• nosubnav: {true|false} if true, hide the sub navigation on the page

Page templating is done using Hogan. Note: template parts need to be escaped eg:

\{{myVariable}}

Knockout data-binding is also used in some pages.

Javascript

Page code-behinds are written in plain ol' Javascript, or use Knockout. Knockout view models are found in /js/models/ are mostly tested. ES2015 syntax is transpiled using Babel.

Testing

Tests reside in the /spec directory, and are written using Jasmine and Sinon. Please ensure any features submitted via pull request are covered by tests.

A number of happy paths are covered by automated browsers tests at: https://github.com/StreetSupport/charter-browser-tests.

Styling

CSS styling is written in SCSS, based on Susy, in the BEM style, and is auto-prefixed. Build with a mobile-first approach, using sass-mq for media queries. Each component's styles should reside in its own file. Avoid nesting of elements and modifiers (although there are many cases of nesting at the moment!).