Getting Started

This GitHub organization is the center of development for digital government services on island.is. It is managed by the Digital Iceland department inside the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs.

These solutions are FOSS and open to contributions, but most development will be performed by teams that win tenders to develop new functionality for Digital Iceland.

The repository is a monorepo that has multiple apps (something that can be built and run) and libraries (which other apps and libraries can depend on). All custom-written services are also stored there.

GitBook

The apps and libraries documentation and our handbook are hosted on GitBook and is publicly available at docs.devland.is.

Storybook

The Ísland.is design system is developed and showcased using Storybook and is publicly available at ui.devland.is.

Reading material

To get more technical information about the project please make sure to read this overview.

External contributors

If you want to contribute to the repository, please make sure to follow this guide.

Prerequisites

• You have Node and Yarn installed as outlined in the engines section in the repository's package.json

• You have Docker installed.

• You have direnv installed.

• You have Java >= 1.8 installed (for schema generation).

If you are running on Windows we recommend using Docker and WSL2

For fetching secrets

• You have AWS command line tools v2 installed.

  • brew install awscli

• You have jq installed.

  • brew install jq

Usage

There are many projects that can be built and run.

To list projects that can be built the following command can be used

yarn nx show projects --with-target build

See further useage of the Nx show command in their docs.

Fresh start/changing branches

Run on whenever you check out a branch:

yarn install
yarn infra
yarn codegen

When you clone the repo for the first time, and whenever you change branches, you need to update your dependencies to match your current branch using yarn install. In addition, schemas change frequently, so you will also need to update the generated schemas and clients using yarn codegen.

Development server

For a dev server:

yarn start <project>

The app will automatically reload if you change any of the source files.

Build

To build the project:

yarn build <project>

The build artifacts will be stored in the dist/ directory. Use the --prod flag for a production build.

Formatting your code

You need to format all files to follow Nx code conventions. To do so run:

yarn nx format:write

Running lint checks

We have many lint rules to help having a unify code all over the project. To execute the linting:

yarn lint <project>

Running lint locally is slow and fill up heap memory. This is related to Typescript compilation and Nx lint builder being slow. As a result you might get a JavaScript heap out of memory. Nx is working on fixing this for an upcoming update. In the meantime you can do NODE_OPTIONS=“--max-old-space-size=4096” yarn lint <project> to raise the memory limit.

Running unit tests

To execute the unit tests via Jest:

yarn test <project>

To execute the unit tests affected by a change:

yarn affected:test

Running end-to-end tests

See our technical documentation on our system e2e setup.

Schemas

If your project is generating schemas files from an OpenAPI, Codegen or is an API, check out this documentation.

Understand your workspace

To see a diagram of the dependencies of your projects:

yarn nx dep-graph

AWS Secrets

A dedicated documentation about fetching shared development secrets or creating new secrets, using AWS secrets is available here.

Running proxy against development service

If you have AWS access to our development account, you can connect to development databases and services using a proxy. We've set up a proxy and connection helpers for our development Postgres, Elastic Search, Redis and X-Road Security Server.

To do so, you can run for example:

./scripts/run-db-proxy.sh

It will try to get your AWS credentials from your environment variables and from your ~/.aws/credentials file. You can find more instructions here.

If you want to run your app against one of this service (e.g. db), you may need to edit your app environment or sequelize config to pass the proxy credentials.

The following services will run on the associated ports: db:5432, es:9200, redis:6379, xroad:80. If you have docker running on theses ports or any others services you will need to stop them in order to run the proxies.

Environment variables with static websites

To be able to access environment variables in purely static projects, you need to do the following:

1. In the index.html file, add <!-- environment placeholder -->.

2. Use the getStaticEnv function from the @island.is/shared/utils library to fetch your environment variables.

3. Prefix your environment variables with SI_PUBLIC_, for example SI_PUBLIC_MY_VARIABLE.

NOTE: This is only to get environment variables when running in kubernetes, not for when running locally. So you should only use getStaticEnv in your environment.prod.ts file.

What happens behind the scenes is that static projects have a bash script that runs when the docker container starts up. This script searches for references of SI_PUBLIC_* in the code and tries to find a match in the environment. It then puts all the matches inside the index.html which is then served to the client.