Developing the Aurora Scheduler UI

Installing bower (optional)

Third party JS libraries used in Aurora (located at 3rdparty/javascript/bower_components) are managed by bower, a JS dependency manager. Bower is only required if you plan to add, remove or update JS libraries. Bower can be installed using the following command:

npm install -g bower

Bower depends on node.js and npm. The easiest way to install node on a mac is via brew:

brew install node

For more node.js installation options refer to https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installation.

More info on installing and using bower can be found at: http://bower.io/. Once installed, you can use the following commands to view and modify the bower repo at 3rdparty/javascript/bower_components

bower list
bower install <library name>
bower remove <library name>
bower update <library name>
bower help

Faster Iteration in Vagrant

The scheduler serves UI assets from the classpath. For production deployments this means the assets are served from within a jar. However, for faster development iteration, the vagrant image is configured to add the scheduler subtree of /vagrant/dist/resources/main to the head of CLASSPATH. This path is configured as a shared filesystem to the path on the host system where your Aurora repository lives. This means that any updates under dist/resources/main/scheduler in your checkout will be reflected immediately in the UI served from within the vagrant image.

The one caveat to this is that this path is under dist not src. This is because the assets must be processed by gradle before they can be served. So, unfortunately, you cannot just save your local changes and see them reflected in the UI, you must first run ./gradlew processResources. This is less than ideal, but better than having to restart the scheduler after every change. Additionally, gradle makes this process somewhat easier with the use of the --continuous flag. If you run: ./gradlew processResources --continuous gradle will monitor the filesystem for changes and run the task automatically as necessary. This doesn’t quite provide hot-reload capabilities, but it does allow for <5s from save to changes being visibile in the UI with no further action required on the part of the developer.