Backend setup notes

Note

These are some advanced setup notes that are useful for running the backend code locally. For the usual process of running and developing on the backend, see the Development Overview.

Pre-populating local database with fixtures

First make sure npm run mongo is running in another command prompt window.

In another terminal, run npm run import to pre-populate the database with the fixtures.

Updating fixtures

If you want to update the default database import file, run npm run fixtures and commit the fixtures to source control.

Running prod code locally

Notes:

cd ../.. && npm run build && cd scripts/beta && cp index.undefined.html index.html && serve -s

Setting up PDF code

PDF generation only works on Linux. To get this to work, first run the following:

cd lambda
npm run install-deps

This will add the wkhtmltopdf binary to chalicelib/bin so that it is available for python-pdfkit. This step is automatically run before deployment.

Setting up email sending on development

To set up local email settings (or to configure the local mongodb url), you need to configure SMTP credentials through a .env file. Run:

cp sample.env .env

Then edit .env and enter in the appropriate SMTP credentials.