GitHub Search App

I have taken this exercise as an opportunity to experiment with a number of technologies which I have not developed with before, including:

• Node.js
• Express
• React
• Chai for unit testing
• Google Cloud Build

Building and running the app

A Docker container with app installed and running can be built and run with:

docker build -t github-search-app . and & docker run -p 8080:8080 github-search-app

Alternatively, the app can be run using NPM directly. It has been built using Node 8.11.3 and NPM 5.6.0. To build and test the app run the following commands:

• npm install
• npm run test:unit
• npm run test:integration
• npm start

With either method the app will be accessible at http://localhost:8080/

CI/Merge testing

I have created a Docker based build pipeline, using Google Cloud Build. The pipeline is configured in cloudbuild.yaml, and a trigger has been configured in GitHub so that every time a pull request is created the pipeline will be run and its status be reported on the pull request. Outside of pull requests the pipeline can also be run from a developer machine with uncommitted changes by running the following command which will upload the workspace and run the build using the same pipeline configuration.

gcloud builds submit --config cloudbuild.yaml . (Google account configuration required)

Future improvements

• Implement paging of search results
• currently up to a maximum of 30 results (default GitHub API page size) are returned and displayed by the client, with no mechanism for viewing more
• Allow sorting of search results
• Add error handling within client when performing a search, along with input validation
• Add unit testing of React components
• Currently githubClient.js within the server component directly writes the response to the client - it would be good for it not to be as tightly coupled
• The mocking performed for testing githubClient.js required defining dependencies with var instead of const, making the code less robust - it would be good to avoid having to change the code like this for tests
• Changing the project configuration so that tests would run on change, rather than having to be manually run

What would I do differently if I started again?

• I would not have created the Express server component
• I initially created this as I thought it would be necessary to authenticate with the GitHub API, and I wanted a means of hiding the authentication token from the client
• Authentication is not required, so API requests could have been made directly by the client which would have reduced the complexity of the app as a whole
• Making GitHub API calls directly from the client could also avoid potential future issues with rate limiting by the GitHub API if a large number of users were to use the app
• I would have created the client as a Node managed project, making it easier to pull in 3rd party React components for building the UI