Pa11y Dashboard

Pa11y Dashboard is a web interface to the Pa11y accessibility reporter; allowing you to focus on fixing issues rather than hunting them down.

✨ 🔜 ✨ The Pa11y team is very excited to announce plans for the successor to Pa11y Dashboard and Pa11y Webservice, codename "Sidekick". Help us define the features that you want to see by visiting the proposal. ✨

Setup

Pa11y Dashboard requires Node.js 4+ and PhantomJS. See the Pa11y documentation for detailed instructions on how to install these dependencies on your operating system.

You'll also need to have MongoDB installed and running. See the MongoDB install guide for more information on this.

You'll then need to clone this repo locally and install dependencies with npm install. Now you need to add some configuration before you can run the application. We can do this in two ways:

Option 1: Using Environment Variables

Each configuration can be set with an environment variable rather than a config file. For example to run the application on port 8080 you can use the following:

PORT=8080 node index.js

The available configurations are documented here.

Option 2: Using Config Files

You'll need to copy and modify different config files depending on your environment (set with NODE_ENV):

cp config/development.sample.json config/development.json
cp config/production.sample.json config/production.json
cp config/test.sample.json config/test.json

Each of these files defines configurations for a different environment. If you're just running the application locally, then you should be OK with just development and test configurations. The available configurations are documented here.

Now that you've got your application configured, make sure you have a MongoDB server running with the mongod command in another terminal window. You can run in each mode by changing the NODE_ENV environment variable:

NODE_ENV=development node index.js

See development instructions for more information about running locally (and restarting automatically when files change).

Configurations

The boot configurations for Pa11y Dashboard are as follows. Look at the sample JSON files in the repo for example usage.

port

(number) The port to run the application on. Set via a config file or the PORT environment variable.

noindex

(boolean) If set to true (default), the dashboard will not be indexed by search engines. Set to false to allow indexing. Set via a config file or the NOINDEX environment variable.

readonly

(boolean) If set to true, users will not be able to add, delete or run URLs (defaults to false). Set via a config file or the READONLY environment variable.

siteMessage

(string) A message to display prominently on the site home page. Defaults to null.

webservice

This can either be an object containing Pa11y Webservice configurations, or a string which is the base URL of a [Pa11y Webservice][pa11y-webservice] instance you are running separately. If using environment variables, prefix the webservice vars with WEBSERVICE_.

Development

To develop Pa11y Dashboard, you'll need to clone the repo and get set up as outlined in the setup guide.

You'll need to start the application in test mode with:

NODE_ENV=test node index.js

Now you'll be able to run the following commands:

make       # Run the lint and test tasks together
make lint  # Run linters with the correct config
make test  # Run integration tests

Code with lint errors or failing tests will not be accepted, please use the build tools outlined above.

To compile the client-side JavaScript and CSS, you'll need the following commands. Compiled code is committed to the repository.

make less    # Compile the site CSS from LESS files
make uglify  # Compile and uglify the client-side JavaScript

Useful Resources

Setting up An Accessibility Dashboard from Scratch with Pa11y on DigitialOcean

Support and Migration

Pa11y Dashboard major versions are normally supported for 6 months after their last minor release. This means that patch-level changes will be added and bugs will be fixed. The table below outlines the end-of-support dates for major versions, and the last minor release for that version.

We also maintain a migration guide to help you migrate.

❔	Major Version	Last Minor Release	Node.js Versions	Support End Date
❤️	2	N/A	4+	N/A
⌛	1	1.12	0.10–6	2016-12-05

If you're opening issues related to these, please mention the version that the issue relates to.

minamarkham / dashboard