Developper documentation

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Installation instructions

This is the procedure to install AirBoarGame application from scratch for to initialize your development environment, or simply to have the system in your own machine / server and host games or play.

AirBoarGame application contains two parts:

a server part (named Backend)
and a client part.

Prerequisite

You need Node.js >= v16 with npm >= v7. For that, you can (and should) use nvm to install and manage your Node.js environment. Execute nvm use in project root folder to start the right environment.
You need to download the last version of AirBoardGame source code into a local folder. You can get it:

By downloading the source zip file and decompress it into a local folder.
By cloning it with git : git clone git@github.com:jrmi/airboardgame.git. You may need to create a github account to proceed this way.

Backend 1/2 - start and configure Ricochet.js server

First, you need an up and running instance of Ricochet.js server. You can create yours by following the instructions in this section or you can use any existing instance.

To start a local instance, execute:

cd backend
npm ci # install dependencies
cp .env.dist .env

Now, you have the opportunity to customize Ricochet.js configuration by editing the .env file. Default values should be fine for quick testing purpose but remember that data are only stored in memory so you'll loose all your changes each time you stop the ricochet.js server with these defaults.

Don't try to fill the RICOCHET_SITE_KEY already because you need to register the Airboardgame site before, but you might want to change the STORE_BACKEND and FILE_STORE here to persist data.

Here's an example configuration to persist data locally:

FILE_STORE_BACKEND=disk
DISK_DESTINATION=/path/to/directory/

JSON_STORE_BACKEND=nedb
NEDB_DIRNAME=/path/to/nedb/database

The two configured paths should be existing and have write permissions for current user.

See Ricochet.js documentation for more options.

Now you can start the ricochet.js server:

npm run ricochetjs

Then create the Airboardgame Ricochet site by visiting your ricochet.js server URL with a browser and fill the site creation form. Default Ricochet server URL, if you haven't modified the configuration should be http://localhost:4050/.

This is a 3 step process:

1) Fill the site creation form with valid data 2) Validate the form and save the secret site key for later use 3) Visit the confirmation link to activate the site

Step 1 - Fill the site creation form

The only important value here is Site id that should have the airboardgame value.

Here's an example:

Step 2 - Validate the form and save the site secret key

Submit the form by clicking the create site button.

Since the form is submitted, save the displayed key and customize .env file using this key to set the RICOCHET_SITE_KEY.

Step 3 - Activate the site by clicking the confirmation link

Remember to confirm the site creation by clicking the link sent by Ricochet.js to the owner email. If your are using a local instance of ricochet with the fake server email (should be the default configuration) the mail is displayed in the ricochet.js console.

Otherwise ensure you have given a valid email address and check the spam if you don't receive the email.

Now you can stop the ricochet.js server (we are going to start it with the rest of the stack in the next step) by using ctrl+c in the server shell.

Backend 2/2 - Start the backend stack

To start the stack just execute:

npm run all

Actually, this command launch 3 other commands:

npm run ricochejs for the Ricochet.js server
npx wire.io@latest for the realtime wire.io websocket relay
npm run watch that watch for backend code modifications to build the backend ricochet.json file.

If you need more informations or more flexibility you might want to visit More details on server section.

In the next section your going to start the web client that connect to this server part.

Client

In another terminal, go back to project root and execute:

cd <project_root>/
npm ci
cp .env.dist .env

Customize the .env file. Default should be fine if you haven't modified server configuration host, port and Site Id.

⚠️ Make sure you have the same value for VITE_RICOCHET_SITEID as the Site Id you used to register the site during the Fill the site creation form of backend installation.

Then you can start the client:

npm start

The last command should open the frontend URL in your browser.

Now you should have two terminals:

first with:
- the Ricochet.js server. Backend logs can be found here.
- a wire.io server running
- and the auto build on change for Airboardgame backend files
and another with web-frontend server

Troubleshooting

If you have troubles getting everything to work, you can first try to launch the check script from the project root directory:

npm run check

It should helps you to point out what's wrong with your installation.

If you still can't make it works, join us on discord or through github.

(Optional) More details on server

When you start the backend part of Airboardgame, you need to start 3 commands. You can start all by using the npm run all command but sometimes you may want more control over how everything is working, for deployment or debugging. In this section you'll find a quick explanation of each command.

Ricochet.js server

You can start the Ricochet.js server by executing:

npm run ricochetjs

If you need more details on Ricochet.js please visit the project page.

Watch & build the backend Airboargame code

You can start backend code modifications monitoring to generate code executed by Ricochet.js from the backend/ directory:

npm run watch

You also can generate the backend code once by executing:

npm run build

These two commands generate the public/ricochet.json file that is executed on Ricochet.js server. This is the actual Airboardgame specific backend code.

Start wire.io socket.io server relay

To allow real time communication between clients, you need to start an instance of wire.io server.

To proceed, execute in the backend/ directory:

# /!\ Need npm >= v7
npx wire.io@latest

See wire.io documentation for more information on how to configure it if you need more options.

Launch e2e tests

Execute the following command:

npm run cypress:open

This open the Cypress console.

Deploy a production instance

Section in progress...

To deploy an instance in production you need to deploy the same stack as in dev.

You need a Ricochet.js server.
You need a Wire.io server.
Build the backend ricochet.json file. (it will be included automatically with the frontend)
Build the frontend and deploy it to a CDN or with any static file server (Apache, Nginx, ...).

Advice

You need to redirect all frontend requests to the index.html page as it's a single page app.

Contributing guide