GitHub Viewer

http://www.githubviewer.org/

An example application that connects to the GitHub REST API and displays users from organizations. Users can then be clicked to retrieve their repositories. Finally, a repository can be clicked and recent commits displayed.

Running locally

To run locally you will need to install Node.js and grunt-bbb. Once the dependencies are installed, simply clone the repository and run the server.

# Clone the repository.
git clone git://github.com/tbranyen/github-viewer.git

# Change directory into it.
cd github-viewer

# Run the server.
bbb server

Stack

This is an entirely client-side application, meaning aside from the configured HTTP server and the remote API, there is no server processing. All logic is isolated to JavaScript.

Backbone Boilerplate

backbone-boilerplate

The foundation of the entire application structure and the deployment assets. Along with grunt-bbb the application can be tested locally and built for production with the same tool.

Some custom tweaks needed to be added for this to work:

Added in an assets/vendor directory.
production-fixes.css file to map the Twitter Bootstrap images correctly.

Backbone LayoutManager

backbone.layoutmanager

Used for the general layout and View arrangement. Is also used to facilitate re-rendering and collection lists. One single layout is created throughout the lifespan of the application and instead the individual regions are updated.

Backbone CollectionCache

backbone.collectioncache.js

This is a work-in-progress Backbone plugin to provide a better caching mechanism for Collections. It's used within this application to provide client-side caching in both sessionStorage (persist refresh) and inside memory for faster lookups.

Twitter Bootstrap

bootstrap

Made the design look significantly better than the original. Responsible for the entire UI layer.

Deployment

This is deployed on a Linode Arch Linux server that runs Nginx. It is served locally and updated via a git pull and bbb release combination.

The configuration looks like:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name githubviewer.org;

  location / {
    root /github-viewer/;

    try_files $uri /index.html;
  }

  location /app {
    alias /github-viewer/dist/release/;
  }

  location /assets/js/libs {
    alias /github-viewer/dist/release/;
  }

  location /assets/css {
    alias /github-viewer/dist/release/;
  }
}

Credits

@tbranyen

neoscott / github-viewer