Frontend

The frontend presents user-facing web pages on pkg.go.dev.

For additional information on functionality of the frontend, see the design document.

Development

The main program lives in cmd/frontend. The bulk of the code lives in internal/frontend.

See experiment.md for instructions how to enable experiments.

Running

You can run the frontend locally like so:

go run ./cmd/frontend [-dev] [-direct_proxy]
  • The -dev flag reloads templates on each page load and rebuilds JavaScript assets when TypeScript source files change.

The frontend can use one of two datasources:

  • Postgres database
  • Proxy service

The Datasource interface implementation is available at internal/datasource.go.

You can use the -direct_proxy flag to run the frontend with its datasource as the proxy service. This allows you to run the frontend without setting up a postgres database.

Alternatively, you can run pkg.go.dev with a local database. See instructions on how to set up and populate your local database with packages of your choice.

You can then run the frontend with: go run ./cmd/frontend

If you add, change or remove any inline scripts in templates, run devtools/cmd/csphash to update the hashes. Running all.bash will do that as well.

Local mode

You can also use run the frontend locally with an in-memory datasource populated with modules loaded from your local filesystem.

go run ./cmd/pkgsite [path1,path2]

This allows you to run the frontend without setting up a database and to view documentation of local modules without requiring a proxy. The command accepts a list of comma-separated strings each representing a path of a module to load into memory.

Screentest

In addition to tests written in Go inside internal/frontend and internal/testing/integration, pages on pkg.go.dev may have image snapshot tests. These tests will create diffs for inspection on failure.

These tests are in the tests/screentest/ directory. For details, see tests/README.md.

Static Assets

JavaScript assets for pkg.go.dev are compiled from TypeScript files in the content/static/js directory. The compiled assets are committed to the repo so the frontend or worker service can be run without any additional steps from a new clone of the project.

Building

When modifying any TypeScript code, you must run go run ./devtools/cmd/static before committing your changes.

Testing

You can test html and static asset changes by running npm test. This will run the TypeScript type checker and unit tests.

Linting

Lint your changes by running npm run lint. This will run stylelint and eslint on CSS and TS files in content/static. You can autofix some errors by running npm run lint -- --fix.

Running npm commands with docker

To run the unit tests or linters without installing npm prefix the command with ./all.bash. This will run the npm through a docker container that has the pkgsite code mounted in an internal directory.

./all.bash npm run <command>