abingham / accu-2017-elm-app

An Elm-based web app for the ACCU 2017 schedule

ACCU 2017 Elm-based schedule app

This is an Elm-based web application for browsing the ACCU 2017 conference schedule.

The structure of this project is largely derived from the excellent Elm Tutorial.

To build and run the app, make sure you've installed a recent version of node.js (>= 6.0.0).

Configuring the environment

The app reads certain configuration information from the file .env. You can find an example of this file in dot.env. Before you can run the system, you need to copy dot.env to .env and edit it as approporiate, for example:

cp dot.env .env
vi .env

The default configuration should be good for local development purposes, but you'll want to use different environments for various deployment scenarios.

Building

First install the necessary npm dependencies:

npm install

Then build the Elm code:

npm run build

If this succeeds, the compiled and web-packed code will be in the dist directory.

Running the development server

For development purposes, we've included a simple server that provides the necessary JSON to the web client. This is usually simpler to use than a full local or remote version of the ACCU website.

To use this, you'll first need to install node-foreman:

npm install -g foreman

You can then use node-foreman to run the API server along with a simple server for the web client:

nf start

After that the app should be available on http://localhost:3000.

When the development server is running, it will monitor changes to the source code and recompile/redeploy as necessary. This is probably what you want to do if you're hacking around in the code; it provides a very responsive edit-run cycle.