Open Practice Library

This is the repository for the Open Practice Library web application.

Local Development

OPL's Back-end Services

To run locally, you will need a connection to a GraphQL server that holds the schema for the Open Practice Library. You can choose to run all of the following services locally, which can be something of a challenge, or you can use the local/docker-compose.yaml file in this repository to spin up the services you need. The only caveats to running the backend services in containers are:

1. You will not be able to make any changes to backend services and test how they affect the frontend.
2. You will not be able to run the API Gateway service in a container. If you want to use it, though, with the other services in containers, that is possible (it is a fairly simple service to run).

Here are the backend services at the current stage of development:

• opl-content-api runs a headless CMS with a GraphQL endpoint at /graphql on port 1337.
• opl-media-service runs a small Apollo Server that takes image uploads, compresses them, and sends them on to the opl-media repository. Runs on port 4002.
• opl-api-gateway runs an Apollo Federation Gateway, which stitches the schemas of it's component services together to create one graph for our frontend to interact with. Runs on port 4000.

There is also a mongo database that starts up to back opl-content-api. You may wish to simply stop the services, rather than removing them completely, if you run these applications in containers, which will keep any data you may have stored in the mongo database available the next time you start the services back up.

Running the container services is simple:

podman-compose up -d

** OR **

docker-compose up -d

This will start the services without the API Gateway. That will work, if all you want to do is manage content (most cases), just connect to the content API on port 1337.

If this is your first time running these services, you will need to open a browser to localhost:1337/admin and create an account in the Strapi interface. You will also want to open the API publicly so that you can access it without an API key. To do that, sign in, go to Roles & Permissions > Public > Permissions and select all on every area that you can. Be sure to open the other menus, like CONTENT-MANAGER, to give yourself full permissions to your local API. You can find out more about Strapi here.

If you really want to run the API Gateway, clone the repo (link is above), open the Makefile and point the environment variables at your services, then run:

npm install
make start

You should see a GraphQL interface at port 4000.

Running this application locally

Once you've started the backend services, or at least are able to connect at localhost:1337/graphql, create a .env.local file (will be ignored by git, but will override any other environment variables), and input:

REACT_APP_GRAPHQL_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:4000/graphql"

** OR ** if you are not running the opl-api-gateway,

REACT_APP_GRAPHQL_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:1337/graphql"

After that, the process is the same as every other React application:

npm install
npm start

Happy Hacking! 🤓 🚀

Further Reading

The wiki, which will contain contribution guidelines, open source design documents, non-technical information about the Open Practice Library, and much more is under construction!