Client Build System

Installs, stages, and builds the client-side scripts necessary for running the Galaxy web client. When started through run.sh or any other method that utilizes scripts/common_startup.sh, Galaxy will (since 18.09) automatically build the client as a part of server startup when it detects changes unless that functionality is explicitly disabled.

The base dependencies used are Node.js and Yarn. Galaxy includes appropriate versions of these in the virtual environment, and they can be accessed by activating that with . .venv/bin/activate from the Galaxy root directory.

If you'd like to install your dependencies external to Galaxy, on OSX the easiest way to get set up is using homebrew and the command brew install nodejs yarn. More information, including instructions for other platforms, is available at https://nodejs.org and https://yarnpkg.com/.

The Galaxy client build has necessarily grown more complex in the past several years, but we are still trying to keep things as simple as possible for everyone. If you're having any trouble with building the client after following the instructions below, please create an issue on GitHub or reach out for help directly on Gitter at https://gitter.im/galaxyproject/Lobby.

Complete Client Build

There are many moving parts to the client build system, but the entry point for most people is the 'client' rule in the Makefile at the root of the Galaxy repository. Execute the following to perform a complete build suitable for local development, including dependency staging, style building, script processing, and bundling. This is a development-specific build that includes extra debugging features and excludes several production optimizations made during the build process.

make client

For a production build, suitable for deploying to a live server, use the following:

make client-production

And, lastly, if you want a production build that includes sourcemaps to allow for inspection of live javascript to facilitate debugging, use:

make client-production-maps

Important Note: The Galaxy repository does not include client script artifacts, and these should not be committed.

Automatic Rebuilding

When you're actively developing, it is convenient to have the client automatically rebuild every time you save a file. You can do this using:

make client-dev-server

Or, with the package scripts from this client directory:

yarn run develop

This will start up an extra client development server running on port 8081. Open your browser to http://localhost:8081 (instead of the default 8080 that Galaxy would run on), and you should see Galaxy like normal. Except now, when you change client code it'll automatically rebuild and reload the relevant portion of the application for you. Lastly, if you are running Galaxy at a location other than the default, you can specify a different proxy target (in this example, port 8000) using the GALAXY_URL environment variable:

GALAXY_URL="http://localhost:8000" make client-dev-server

Sometimes you want to run your local UI against a remote Galaxy server. This is also possible if you set the CHANGE_ORIGIN environment variable:

CHANGE_ORIGIN=true GALAXY_URL="https://usegalaxy.org/" make client-dev-server

You can also specify a particular port to bind the dev server to:

WEBPACK_PORT=8083 yarn run develop

Running a Separate Server

When developing the client it can be helpful to run a local server for the client to connect to, and run the client separately with one of the above commands. This command will run galaxy without building the client:

make skip-client

Or by setting the following environment variable and running Galaxy however you prefer:

GALAXY_SKIP_CLIENT_BUILD=1 ./run.sh

Changing Styles/CSS

Galaxy uses Sass for globally applied styling, which is a superset of CSS that compiles down to regular CSS. Most Galaxy styling source (.scss) files are kept in client/src/style/scss. Many components will also have local style blocks containing styles that are particular to that individual component and do not apply site-wide.

On build, the compiled css bundle is served at /static/dist/base.css.

As mentioned above, make client will rebuild styles as a part of the webpack build. For iterative development, "Watch Mode" rebuilds as described above do include style changes.

Client-Side Unit Testing

Galaxy's client is undergoing an extensive refactoring and modernizing process. As part of this initiative, we would like to request that all new client-side code submissions come with accompanying javascript unit-tests for the developer-facing API of your new code.

Testing Technologies

Galaxy uses Jest for its client-side unit testing framework.

For testing Vue components, we use the Vue testing utils to mount individual components in a test bed and check them for rendered features. Please use jest-based mocking for isolating test functionality.

Running the tests

At Build-Time

To simply run all the javascript unit tests, you can use make from the root directory. This is what happens during a complete client build.

 make client-test

During Development

During client-side development, it is more convenient to have granular testing options. The various testing scripts are defined inside package.json within the client folder and are called with yarn as demonstrated in the following commands.

This is what CI is going to run, and also what 'make client-test' invokes, executing all the client tests:

 yarn test

Watch and rerun jest unit tests every time a source file changes

This is incredibly handy, and there are a host of options in the interactive terminal this starts for executing Jest tests.

 yarn run jest-watch

Run only specified test files when a source file changes

yarn run jest-watch MyModule

yarn run jest-watch Dialog

yarn run jest-watch workflow/run