VA.gov

What is this?

This is the front end repository for VA.gov. It contains application code and templates used across the site.

There are several repositories that contain the code and content used to build VA.gov. If you're looking to get started running VA.gov locally, you should read the Getting Started documentation.

Common commands

Once you have the site set up locally, these are some common commands you might find useful:

Building vets-website

The vets-website build has two main functions:

1. Build the application assets (JS, CSS)
2. Create the static HTML pages

Building applications

vets-website uses Webpack to bundle application assets.

To build all applications, run the following:

yarn build:webpack

To recompile your application when you make changes, run:

yarn watch

You can also limit the applications Webpack builds with --env.entry:

yarn watch --env.entry static-pages,auth

The entryname for your application can be found in its manifest.json file.

If you're developing a feature that requires the API, but can't or don't want to run it locally, you can specify --env.api:

yarn watch --env.api https://dev-api.va.gov

Note: If you try to log on, ID.me will redirect you to the environment that the API is set up for. So in the above example, you'd be redirected back to dev.va.gov.

Building static content

VA.gov is a static site with individual applications served up on certain pages. When testing changes to static pages, or to see what your application looks like on VA.gov, you'll need to build the static pages.

yarn build:content

Pro tip: To see the same landing page for your application as what will be on VA.gov, run yarn build:content once to build the static HTML files, then yarn watch to watch for changes in your application and serve the site via webpack-dev-server. Any time run yarn build:webpack or yarn watch, the static HTML pages from the build:content task will not be overwritten.

To pull the latest Drupal content, run:

yarn build:content --pull-drupal

Note: This requires access to the SOCKS proxy. If you do not have access to the proxy, you can fetch the latest cached version of the content with the following:

yarn fetch-drupal-cache

Building both together

CI will build both applications and content with the following:

yarn build

Running tests

Unit tests

To run all unit tests, use:

yarn test:unit

If you want to run only one test file, you can provide the path to it:

yarn test:unit src/applications/path/to/test-file.unit.spec.js

To run all tests for a folder in src/applications, you can use app-folder:

yarn test:unit --app-folder hca

To run all tests in a directory, you can use a glob pattern:

yarn test:unit src/applications/path/to/tests/**/*.unit.spec.js*

To run tests with some extra debugging info, you can pass a log-level:

yarn test:unit --log-level debug

End-to-end (E2E) / Browser tests

• E2E or browser tests primarily run in Cypress.
• Some older, existing tests run in Nightwatch, but those are deprecated.

To open the Cypress test runner UI and run any tests within it:

yarn cy:open

To run Cypress tests from the command line:

yarn cy:run

To run specific Cypress tests from the command line:

# Running one specific test.
yarn cy:run --spec "path/to/test-file.cypress.spec.js"

# Running multiple specific tests.
yarn cy:run --spec "path/to/test-a.cypress.spec.js,path/to/test-b.cypress.spec.js"

# Running tests that match a glob pattern.
yarn cy:run --spec "src/applications/my-app/tests/*"
yarn cy:run --spec "src/applications/my-app/tests/**/*"

# Running tests that match multiple glob patterns.
yarn cy:run --spec "src/applications/a/tests/**/*,src/applications/b/tests/**/*"

To run Cypress tests from the command line on a specific browser:

yarn cy:run --headless --browser chrome
yarn cy:run --headless --browser firefox

# Without --headless, the test runner will open and run the test.
yarn cy:run --browser chrome
yarn cy:run --browser firefox

For other options with yarn cy:run, the same options for cypress run are applicable.

To run Nightwatch tests, you first need three things:

1. Install the Java JDK on MacOS (if needed):

   brew update
   brew tap adoptopenjdk/openjdk
   brew cask install adoptopenjdk8
   

2. vets-website served locally on port 3001
   • You can do this with yarn watch
3. vets-api to NOT be running
   • The browser tests will use a simple mock api on port 3000, but only if nothing is already attached to that port

yarn test:e2e

Just like with unit tests, you can also specify the path to the test file

yarn test:e2e src/applications/path/to/test-file.e2e.spec.js

Running a mock API for local development

In separate terminal from your local dev server, run

yarn mock-api --responses path/to/responses.js

See the mocker-api usage documentation for how to use the responses.js.

If you need to log in, go to your browser dev tools console and enter localStorage.setItem('hasSession', true) and refresh the page. This will then trigger a /v0/user call, which will then get the mocked response of a logged-in user. (Assuming you've mocked that response, of course.)

Responses to common API requests, such as /v0/user and /v0/maintenance_windows, you can use src/platform/testing/local-dev-mock-api/common.js

const commonResponses = require('src/platform/testing/local-dev-mock-api/common');

module.exports = {
  ...commonResponses,
  'GET path/to/endpoint': { foo: 'bar' },
};

More commands

After a while, you may run into a less common task. We have a lot of commands for doing very specific things.

Supported Browsers

Additional Resources

1. VA.gov Knowledge Hub
2. Docs Directory
3. Manual and Automated 508 Testing