OPAL Frontend

This is an Angular SSR application. There are two main reasons for this:

• the web server for when the app is deployed in Kubernetes.

• to proxy API requests to internally-facing backend API services, such as the opal-fines-service.

Contents

• Getting Started
• Local Development Strategy
• Production Server
• Running Unit Tests
• Running End-to-End Tests
• Accessibility Tests
• Switching Between Local and Published Common Libraries

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Running the application requires the following tools to be installed in your environment:

• Node.js v20.9.0 or later

• yarn v3

• Docker

Install Dependencies

Install dependencies by executing the following command:

yarn

Local Development Strategy

1. Clone opal-fines-service api

Clone the opal-fines-service repository and follow the instructions in there to get it up and running. This is required by the front end to make local API requests.

2. Clone opal-frontend-common-ui-lib

Clone the opal-frontend-common-ui-lib repository and run:

yarn
yarn build

This is required if you want to develop the frontend against the local version of the UI library using yarn dev:local-lib:ssr.

3. Clone opal-frontend-common-node-lib

Clone the opal-frontend-common-node-lib repository and run:

yarn
yarn build

This is required if you want to develop the frontend against the local version of the Node library using yarn dev:local-lib:ssr.

4. Development server

There are two ways to run the Angular SSR application depending on whether you are developing against local or published versions of the common libraries:

• To use the published versions of the libraries:

  yarn dev:ssr

  This will import the latest published versions of @hmcts/opal-frontend-common and @hmcts/opal-frontend-common-node, then start the SSR dev server.

• To use local versions of the libraries:

  First, ensure you've built the libraries locally and set the environment variables:

  export COMMON_UI_LIB_PATH="[INSERT PATH TO COMMON UI LIB DIST FOLDER]"
  export COMMON_NODE_LIB_PATH="[INSERT PATH TO COMMON NODE LIB DIST FOLDER]"

  Ensure you've built both libraries and exported the environment variables before running this command.

  Then run:

  yarn dev:local-lib:ssr

  This will import the local builds and start the SSR dev server with those versions.

The application's home page will be available at http://localhost:4200.

Note this is running the Angular SSR application and expects the opal-fines-service to also be running locally to function correctly.

5. Production server

There are two options depending on whether you're working with local or published versions of the common libraries. This command builds the Angular SSR application for production and serves it. You will not have hot reloading in this mode.

• To build and serve the application using the published libraries:

  yarn build:serve:ssr

  This will:

  • Import the published versions of @hmcts/opal-frontend-common and @hmcts/opal-frontend-common-node
  • Build the application for production
  • Serve it on http://localhost:4000

• To build and serve the application using local libraries:

  First, ensure you've built both common libraries and set the environment variables:

  export COMMON_UI_LIB_PATH="[INSERT PATH TO COMMON UI LIB DIST FOLDER]"
  export COMMON_NODE_LIB_PATH="[INSERT PATH TO COMMON NODE LIB DIST FOLDER]"

  Ensure you've built both libraries and exported the environment variables before running this command.

  Then run:

  yarn build:serve:local-lib:ssr

  This will:

  • Import the local builds of the common libraries
  • Build the application for production
  • Serve it on http://localhost:4000

The application's home page will be available at http://localhost:4000.

Note this is running the Angular SSR application and expects the opal-fines-service to also be running locally to function correctly.

6. Redis (Optional)

By default Redis is disabled for local development. If desired, start up a Redis instance locally:

docker run -p 6379:6379 -it redis/redis-stack-server:latest

And enable Redis integration within the application by setting the environment variable FEATURES_REDIS_ENABLED to true. The application will connect to Redis on the next startup.

7. Launch Darkly (Optional)

By default Launch Darkly is disabled by default for local development. To enable set the following environment variables. Replace XXXXXXXXXXXX with the project client id.

export FEATURES_LAUNCH_DARKLY_ENABLED=true
export LAUNCH_DARKLY_CLIENT_ID=XXXXXXXXXXXX

The streaming of flags is disabled by default, if you would like to enable set the following environment variable.

export FEATURES_LAUNCH_DARKLY_STREAM=true

Build

Run yarn build:ssr to build the project. The build artifacts will be stored in the dist/opal-frontend directory. This compiles both the node.js server-side code and angular code.

Code style

We use ESLint and Prettier

Running the linting:

yarn lint

You can fix prettier formatting issues using:

yarn  prettier:fix

Running unit tests

Run yarn test to execute the unit tests via karma.

To check code coverage, run yarn test --code-coverage to execute the unit tests via karma but with code coverage. Code coverage can then be found in the coverage folder of the repository locally.

Running end-to-end tests

We are using cypress for our end to end tests.

Run yarn test:smoke to execute the end-to-end smoke tests.

yarn test:smoke

Run yarn test:functional to execute the end-to-end functional tests.

yarn test:functional

Run yarn cypress to open the cypress console, very useful for debugging tests.

yarn cypress

Running accessibility tests

We are using axe-core and cypress-axe to check the accessibility. Run the production server and once running you can run the smoke or functional test commands.

See opal-frontend-common-ui-lib and opal-frontend-common-node-lib for usage and build instructions.

Switching Between Local and Published Common Libraries

This project supports switching between local and published versions of the opal-frontend-common and opal-frontend-common-node libraries using the following scripts:

Switching to Local Versions

First, ensure you've built the libraries locally and exported the paths to the built dist folders:

# In your shell config file (.zshrc, .bash_profile, etc.)
export COMMON_UI_LIB_PATH="[INSERT PATH TO COMMON UI LIB FOLDER]"
export COMMON_NODE_LIB_PATH="[INSERT PATH TO COMMON NODE LIB DIST FOLDER]"

Then, run the following scripts:

yarn import:local:common-ui-lib
yarn import:local:common-node-lib

These commands will remove the published versions and install the local builds from the paths you specified.

Switching to Published Versions

To restore the published packages from npm:

yarn import:published:common-ui-lib
yarn import:published:common-node-lib

This is useful when you're no longer working on the libraries directly or want to verify against the published version.

Angular code scaffolding

Run yarn ng generate component component-name to generate a new component. You can also use yarn ng generate directive|pipe|service|class|guard|interface|enum|module.

Note the requirement for prefixing the ng commands with yarn