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README.md

Open-Assistant NextJS Website

Purpose

This provides a comprehensive webapp interface for LAION's Open Assistant project. Initially it will support:

  1. User registration using either Discord or Email.
  2. Adding responses to incomplete Open Assistant tasks.
  3. Rating or Ranking responses to Open Assistant tasks.
  4. Viewing an activity leaderboard.
  5. Tracking community wide updates.

This interface compliments the Discord bot and will give access to the same underlying tasks.

Contributing

Major Dependencies

This website is built using:

  1. npm: The node package manager for building.
  2. React: The core frontend framework.
  3. Next.js: A React scaffolding framework to streamline development.
  4. Prisma: An ORM to interact with a web specific Postgres database.
  5. NextAuth.js: A user authentication framework to ensure we handle accounts with best practices.
  6. TailwindCSS: A general purpose framework for styling any component.
  7. Chakra-UI: A wide collection of pre-built UI components that generally look pretty good.

Set up your environment

To contribute to the website, make sure you have the following setup and installed:

  1. NVM: The Node Version Manager makes it easy to ensure you have the right NodeJS version installed. Once installed, run nvm use 16 to use Node 16.x. The website is known to be stable with NodeJS version 16.x. This will install both Node and NPM.
  2. Docker: We use docker to simplify running dependent services.

Getting everything up and running

If you're doing active development we suggest the following workflow:

  1. In one tab, navigate to the project root.
  2. Run docker compose up frontend-dev --build --attach-dependencies. You can optionally include -d to detach and later track the logs if desired.
  3. In another tab navigate to ${OPEN_ASSISTANT_ROOT/website.
  4. Run npm install
  5. Run npx prisma db push (This is also needed when you restart the docker stack from scratch).
  6. Run npm run dev. Now the website is up and running locally at http://localhost:3000.
  7. To create an account, login via the user using email authentication and navigate to http://localhost:1080. Check the email listed and click the log in link. You're now logged in and authenticated.

Using debug user credentials

You can use the debug credentials provider to log in without fancy emails or OAuth.

  1. This feature is automatically on in development mode, i.e. when you run npm run dev. In case you want to do the same with a production build (for example, the docker image), then run the website with environment variable DEBUG_LOGIN=true.
  2. Use the Login button in the top right to go to the login page.
  3. You should see a section for debug credentials. Enter any username you wish, you will be logged in as that user.

Using Storybook

To develop components using Storybook run npm run storybook. Then navigate to in your browser to http://localhost:6006.

To create a new story create a file named [componentName].stories.js. An example how such a story could look like, see Header.stories.jsx.

Code Layout

React Code

All react code is under src/ with a few sub directories:

  1. pages/: All pages a user could navigate too and API URLs which are under pages/api/.
  2. components/: All re-usable React components. If something gets used twice we should create a component and put it here.
  3. lib/: A generic place to store library files that are used anywhere. This doesn't have much structure yet.

NOTE: styles/ can be ignored for now.

Database

All database configurations are stored in prisma/schema.prisma.

Static Content

All static images, fonts, svgs, etc are stored in public/.

Styles

We're not really using CSS styles. styles/ can be ignored.

Testing the UI

Cypress is used for end-to-end (e2e) and component testing and is configured in ./cypress.config.ts. The ./cypress folder is used for supporting configuration files etc.

  • Store e2e tests in the ./cypress/e2e folder.
  • Store component tests adjacent to the component being tested. If you want to wriite a test for ./src/components/Layout.tsx then store the test file at ./src/components/Layout.cy.tsx.

A few npm scripts are available for convenience:

  • npm run cypress: Useful for development, it opens Cypress and allows you to explore, run and debug tests. It assumes you have the NextJS site running at localhost:3000.
  • npm run cypress:run: Runs all tests. Useful for a quick sanity check before sending a PR or to run in CI pipelines.
  • npm run cypress:image-baseline: If you have tests failing because of visual changes that was expected, this command will update the baseline images stored in ./cypress-visual-screenshots/baseline with those from the adjacent comparison folder. More can be found in the docs of uktrade/cypress-image-diff.

Read more in the ./cypress README.

Best Practices

When writing code for the website, we have a few best practices:

  1. When importing packages import external dependencies first then local dependencies. Order them alphabetically according to the package name.
  2. When trying to implement something new, check if Chakra-UI has components that are close enough to your need. For example Sliders, Radio Buttons, Progress indicators, etc. They have a lot and we can save time by re-using what they have and tweaking the style as needed.
  3. Format everything with Prettier. This is done by default with pre-submits. We currently don't have any custom settings.
  4. Define functional React components (with types for all properties when feasible).

URL Paths

To use stable and consistent URL paths, we recommend the following strategy for new tasks:

  1. For any task that involves writing a free-form response, put the page under website/src/pages/create with a page name matching the task type, such as summarize_story.tsx.
  2. For any task that evaluates, rates, or ranks content, put the page under website/src/pages/evaluate with a page name matching the task type such as rate_summary.tsx.

With this we'll be able to ensure these contribution pages are hidden from logged out users but accessible to logged in users.

Learn More

To learn more about Next.js, take a look at the following resources: