index.md

title
Backend Development Guidelines

You can use a fully functional local version to develop and test both frontend and backend. It requires at least 2GB RAM or swap enabled.

To bring it up, run:

cp compose-dev-backend.yml compose-private.yml
# now, edit / debug `compose-private.yml` to your heart's content

# build and run
docker-compose -f compose-private.yml up --build

It starts Remark42 on 127.0.0.1:8080 and adds local OAuth2 provider "Dev". To access the UI demo page go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/web/. By default, you would be logged in as dev_user, defined as admin. You can tweak any of the supported parameters in corresponded yml file.

Important: use 127.0.0.1 and not localhost to access the server, as otherwise, CORS will prevent your browser from authentication to work correctly.

Backend Docker Compose config (compose-dev-backend.yml) by default skips running frontend related tests. Frontend Docker Compose config (compose-dev-frontend.yml) by default skips running backend related tests and sets NODE_ENV=development for frontend build.

Backend development

With Docker

Run tests in your IDE, and re-run make rundev each time you want to see how your code changes behave to test them at http://127.0.0.1:8080/web/.

Without Docker

You have to install the latest stable go toolchain to run the backend locally.

In order to have working Remark42 installation you need once to copy frontend static files to ./backend/web directory from master docker image, and also copy files from ./templates to the ./backend as they are expected to be where application starts:

# frontend files
docker pull umputun/remark42:master
docker create -ti --name remark42files umputun/remark42:master sh
docker cp remark42files:/srv/web/ ./backend/
docker rm -f remark42files
# template files
cp ./backend/templates/* ./backend
# fix frontend files to point to the right URL
## Mac version
find -E ./backend/web -regex '.*\.(html|js|mjs)$' -print -exec sed -i '' "s|{% REMARK_URL %}|http://127.0.0.1:8080|g" {} \;
## Linux version
find ./backend/web -regex '.*\.\(html\|js\|mjs\)$' -print -exec sed -i "s|{% REMARK_URL %}|http://127.0.0.1:8080|g" {} \;

To run backend - cd backend; go run app/main.go server --dbg --secret=12345 --url=http://127.0.0.1:8080 --admin-passwd=password --site=remark. It stars backend service with embedded bolt store on port 8080 with basic auth, allowing to authenticate and run requests directly, like this:

HTTP http://admin:password@127.0.0.1:8080/api/v1/find?site=remark&sort=-active&format=tree&url=http://127.0.0.1:8080