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Mijn-Amsterdam Front-end

Hi and welcome to the Mijn-Amsterdam front-end + bff repository!

This repo is the main codebase for the web application found at mijn.amsterdam.nl which is a portal for official communication with the municipality of Amsterdam. The application consists of 2 main parts:

  • React application
  • Node Express back-end-for-frontend (BFF)

To see the application quickly running locally, clone the repo and cd into the project folder. Inside the project folder create a new file called .env.local. Put the keys from .env.local.template inside the file AND ask one of the developers for possible additional values.

Set-up

We use Node, and to install the latest version, follow the instructions in this Link.
Then execute the following commands in a bash terminal to install it and the rest of our dependencies:

cp -i .env.local.template .env.local
nvm install
npm install -g ts-node nodemon
npm install

Running locally

Put the following commands in your terminal after all dependencies are installed:

npm run serve-dev
npm start

It's also possible to run both the mocks server and bff seperately with:

npm run start
npm run mock-server
npm run bff-api:watch

Accessibility + Targeted browsers

The Mijn Amsterdam design and development team works hard to ensure mijn.amsterdam.nl is accessible. Not all browsers in the world are supported. The targeted browsers can be found here.

React application

  • The language used is Typescript
  • The application is built and tested with vite/vitest.
  • Only functional components are used in combination with the hooks api.
  • For styling we use scss and scss modules

There is no super strict convention (yet) for grouping components, functions, types etc. For larger components we might want to separate for example additional components, helpers, config and constants into other files as done in src/client/pages/Profile or src/server/services/focus.

A blueprint for basic components can be found in components/AlphaComponent/. A blueprint for page components is located in pages/AlphaPage. To generate a component based on these blueprints you can either copy/paste rename stuff or use a tool like npm install -g generact which can be used to duplicate any component and assign it a specific name.

BFF api

The BFF api is the goto part of the application where we do data fetching, data transformations, short-lived request/response caching, error handling and response formatting. The codebase is also written in typescript so a compilation step is required for it to work. For development purposes we use ts-node which takes care of compiling and running the BFF app.

Authentication

We use an OIDC idp to authenticate the users via Digid or Eherkenning. The max session duration is 15 * 60 seconds = 15 minutes. Incoming tokens are verified and passed along with the requests to the microservices. In the microservices these tokens are verified once more for added security.

BFF Development api

The BFF also has a router that's intended for development purposes only. Not all api requests are targeted at the BFF api in production, some requests are made to the microservice api's directly. For this purpose we have a development router with mock endpoints see router-development.ts. For example, vergunning documents and resident count are retrieved directly without going through the BFF. It's basically an additional development server integrated in the BFF api.

Some code conventions

  • Constants are defined in SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE
  • Variables that are not re-assigned are always const
  • Variables that get re-assigned are always let
  • All filenames in src/server should be kebab-cased.ts
  • React component Filenames in src/client are PascalCased.tsx
  • If you have a TODO:, provide a ticket number
  • TODO: ES-Lint will be configured in the future.

Tooling

System

  • node
  • typescript
  • vite

Required IDE plugins

  • prettier with "format on save" option on.
  • .editorconfig

Testing and development

  • vitest for BFF development

Branch naming + PR

  • When creating a new branch, preferably, branch off main
  • When creating a branch, start the name with a ticket number from Jira e.g: mijn-1234-update-logo
  • Try to rebase on main and squash commits when PR'ing to it so we keep a fairly clean commit log on Main

Continuous integration / Continuous deployment

We currently work with a trunk based development approach. see also This means we have relatively short lived branches and only 1 main branch (main) The main branch should always be production worthy in terms of functionality, stability and code quality. Every release to production is accompanied with a release tag in the from of: release-v1.2.3. Whenever you are about create a release, use the npm run release or npm run release:(major|bug) (for more specific versions) command. This command creates a semver version of the release tag and pushes it to origin in a separte production branch. The CI/CD pipeline will automatically detect the branch and starts building a release.

Debugging

export DEBUG=1 will log some BFF info and also outgoing http requests via the log-that-http package. Headers and Body can be made visible as well by export LOG_THAT_HTTP_HEADERS=true for headers and export LOG_THAT_HTTP_BODY=true for request bodies.

export DEBUG_RESPONSE_DATA=term1,term2 Logs response data from incoming responses before any transformation. A comma separated list of keywords / pathsegments can be used to log specific requests. For example: zorgned/aanvragen,gpass

Guides

Making use of an ENV variable in frontend

  • Add variable to env.local.template, prefix variable with REACT_APP_ (don't forget to add to env.local as well)
  • Add variable as build ARG in Docker file
ARG REACT_APP_VARIABLE_NAME=
ENV REACT_APP_VARIABLE_NAME=$REACT_APP_VARIABLE_NAME
  • Add variable to infra repo for frontend ci/cd

You should now be able to access import.meta.env.REACT_APP_VARIABLE_NAME