MarkLogic Grove React-Redux-Node Template

Grove is a framework to help developers and architects build UI-rich applications backed by MarkLogic, the multi-model, enterprise NoSQL database.

Every Grove Project consists of a one or more middle-tier or UI Applications. Those Applications communicate using defined Grove APIs (at least for core functions: you can also create ad-hoc extensions). Application-behavior is generally added by installing Plugins,which are versioned and thus can be upgraded over the life of the Project.

This particular repository contains a Template for a React-Redux-Node Grove Project. A Project based on this Template consists of a Node Express middle-tier and a React-Redux front-end. This reference Template provides a simple search and discovery application.

Grove and this Project are beta and are still changing often in breaking ways.

Create a Project Based on this React-Redux-Node Template

Follow the instructions in the Grove Getting Started Guide in order to create a new Grove project.

About Projects Based on this Template

The reference project includes three directories: 'ui' (for Vue.js front-end and Redux client-state management code), 'middle-tier' (for a reference Node implementation of a middle-tier), and 'marklogic' (for database configuration and sample data loading).

When you run commands like npm install and npm start from the top-level, it automatically runs the relevant commands. For example, npm install installs npm dependencies within the Node middle-tier and the ui application. Similarly, npm start starts the Node middle-tier, as well as a Webpack development server to serve up HTML, Javascript and CSS on port 3000.

The ui part of this project was built using the Create-React-App library, in order to rely on expert community help in staying up-to-date as the ecosystem changes. Much configuration is done using the tools provided by that library. Please refer to their extensive User Guide to understand how to configure various parts of the ui application.

Developing your project

To install dependencies:

npm install

To create shared configuration between the three tiers (marklogic, middle-tier, and ui):

grove config

To run the tests:

npm test

To start a development server at localhost:3000:

npm start

For more discussion about how to make changes to your Grove project see the "Learning to Customize and Extend Your Application" section of GUIDE.markdown in this repository.

Run your project in production

This command will build the ui into static files and start the Node middle-tier in production. The Node middle-tier will serve those static UI files. See middle-tier/README.markdown if you need to configure how that works, or the path to the static files. Note that it is a better practice to set up a reverse proxy like Nginx or HAProxy to serve these static files instead, but this will do..

If you have not already done so, you will need to build your current UI into static files within the ui/build directory. You may want to set NODE_ENV to "production", so the build process includes all production optimizations.

NODE_ENV=production npm run build

Then you can run:

npm run start:prod

By default, start:prod will set NODE_ENV to "production", and it will tell the middle-tier to serve the built UI from ui/build, by setting GROVE_UI_BUILD_PATH to "../ui/build". You can modify this command if, for example, you are following best practices and serving the UI files from a reverse proxy.

Note that this will run on http://localhost:9003 by default (rather than port 3000, where the development Webpack server runs by default).

You can more durably set the GROVE_UI_BUILD_PATH in middle-tier/.env or middle-tier/.env.production (or some other .env file) rather than specifying it on the command line. Just add the line:

GROVE_UI_BUILD_PATH=../ui/build

UI and Middle-Tier Application Documentation

Much additional documentation is available in ui/README.markdown and middle-tier/README.markdown about the UI and middle-tier specifically. Please also look there for information.

Customizing

As you work with your Grove Project, you will soon want to customize it. To understand the design of the UI-Toolkit and how to customize it to your needs, is most important to understand how to use Grove to quickly create a MarkLogic-backed project - and then to customize it. For this, please read the Advanced Guide to Grove.

For those seeking to contribute to the project, our evolving Best Practices document are designed to get contributors on the same page and to communicate some of our goals. The Contributing document has additional concrete advice for contributors. Please read both.

Developing Pieces of Grove Itself

NOTE: This section is currently out-of-date! Updates coming soon.

For those seeking to contribute to the project, our evolving Best Practices document are designed to get contributors on the same page and to communicate some of our goals. The Contributing document has additional concrete advice for contributors. Please read both.