Frontend

On this page

Welcome to the guide for contributing to the Coder frontend. Whether you’re part of the community or a Coder team member, this documentation will help you get started.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on our Discord server, and we’ll be happy to assist you.

Running the UI

You can run the UI and access the Coder dashboard in two ways:

Build the UI pointing to an external Coder server: CODER_HOST=https://mycoder.com pnpm dev inside of the site folder. This is helpful when you are building something in the UI and already have the data on your deployed server.
Build the entire Coder server + UI locally: ./scripts/develop.sh in the root folder. This is useful for contributing to features that are not deployed yet or that involve both the frontend and backend.

In both cases, you can access the dashboard on http://localhost:8080. If using ./scripts/develop.sh you can log in with the default credentials.

Note

Default Credentials: [email protected] and SomeSecurePassword!.

Tech Stack Overview

All our dependencies are described in site/package.json, but the following are the most important.

React for the UI framework
Typescript to keep our sanity
Vite to build the project
react-router for routing
TanStack Query for fetching data
Vitest for integration testing
Playwright for end-to-end (E2E) testing
Storybook and pixel-storybook for visual testing
pnpm as the package manager

Structure

All UI-related code is in the site folder. Key directories include:

e2e - End-to-end (E2E) tests
src - Source code
- @types - Custom types for dependencies that don't have defined types (largely code that has no server-side equivalent)
- api - API function calls and types
  - queries - react-query queries and mutations
- components - Reusable UI components without Coder specific business logic
- hooks - Custom React hooks
- modules - Coder specific logic and components related to multiple parts of the UI
- pages - Page-level components
- testHelpers - Helper functions for integration testing
- theme - theme configuration and color definitions
- util - Helper functions that can be used across the application
static - Static assets like images, fonts, icons, etc

Do not use barrel files. Imports should be directly from the file that defines the value.

Routing

We use react-router as our routing engine.

Authenticated routes - Place routes requiring authentication inside the <RequireAuth> route. The RequireAuth component handles all the authentication logic for the routes.
Dashboard routes - routes that live in the dashboard should be placed under the <DashboardLayout> route. The DashboardLayout adds a navbar and passes down common dashboard data.

Pages

Page components are the top-level components of the app and reside in the src/pages folder. Each page should have its own folder to group relevant views, tests, and utility functions. The page component fetches necessary data and passes to the view. We explain this decision a bit better in the next section which talks about where to fetch data.

If code within a page becomes reusable across other parts of the app, consider moving it to src/utils, hooks, components, or modules.

Handling States

A page typically has three states: loading, ready/success, and error. Ensure you manage these states when developing pages. Use visual tests for these states with *.stories.ts files.

Data Fetching

We use TanStack Query v4 to fetch data from the API. Queries and mutation should be placed in the api/queries folder.

Where to fetch data

In the past, our approach involved creating separate components for page and view, where the page component served as a container responsible for fetching data and passing it down to the view.

For instance, when developing a page to display users, we would have a UsersPage component with a corresponding UsersPageView. The UsersPage would handle API calls, while the UsersPageView managed the presentational logic.

Over time, however, we encountered challenges with this approach, particularly in terms of excessive props drilling. To address this, we opted to fetch data in proximity to its usage. Taking the example of displaying users, in the past, if we were creating a header component for that page, we would have needed to fetch the data in the page component and pass it down through the hierarchy (UsersPage -> UsersPageView -> UsersHeader). Now, with libraries such as react-query, data fetching can be performed directly in the UsersHeader component, allowing UI elements to declare and consume their data-fetching dependencies directly, while preventing duplicate server requests (more info).

To simplify visual testing of scenarios where components are responsible for fetching data, you can easily set the queries' value using parameters.queries within the component's story.

export const WithQuota: Story = {
    parameters: {
        queries: [
            {
                key: getWorkspaceQuotaQueryKey(MockUserOwner.username),
                data: {
                    credits_consumed: 2,
                    budget: 40,
                },
            },
        ],
    },
};

API

Our project uses axios as the HTTP client for making API requests. The API functions are centralized in site/src/api/api.ts. Auto-generated TypeScript types derived from our Go server are located in site/src/api/typesGenerated.ts.

Typically, each API endpoint corresponds to its own Request and Response types. However, some endpoints require additional parameters for successful execution. Here's an illustrative example:"

export const getAgentListeningPorts = async (
    agentID: string,
): Promise<TypesGen.ListeningPortsResponse> => {
    const response = await axiosInstance.get(
        `/api/v2/workspaceagents/${agentID}/listening-ports`,
    );
    return response.data;
};

Sometimes, a frontend operation can have multiple API calls which can be wrapped as a single function.

export const updateWorkspaceVersion = async (
    workspace: TypesGen.Workspace,
): Promise<TypesGen.WorkspaceBuild> => {
    const template = await getTemplate(workspace.template_id);
    return startWorkspace(workspace.id, template.active_version_id);
};

Components and Modules

Components should be atomic, reusable and free of business logic. Modules are similar to components except that they can be more complex and can contain business logic specific to the product.

MUI

The codebase is currently using MUI v5. Please see the official documentation. In general, favor building a custom component via MUI instead of plain React/HTML, as MUI's suite of components is thoroughly battle-tested and accessible right out of the box.

Structure

Each component and module gets its own folder. Module folders may group multiple files in a hierarchical structure. Storybook stories and component tests using Storybook interactions are required. By keeping these tidy, the codebase will remain easy to navigate, healthy and maintainable for all contributors.

Accessibility

We strive to keep our UI accessible.

In general, colors should come from the app theme, but if there is a need to add a custom color, please ensure that the foreground and background have a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 to meet WCAG level AA compliance. WebAIM has a great tool for checking your colors directly, but tools like Dequeue's axe DevTools can also do automated checks in certain situations.

When using any kind of input element, always make sure that there is a label associated with that element (the label can be made invisible for aesthetic reasons, but it should always be in the HTML markup). Labels are important for screen-readers; a placeholder text value is not enough for all users.

When possible, make sure that all image/graphic elements have accompanying text that describes the image. <img /> elements should have an alt text value. In other situations, it might make sense to place invisible, descriptive text inside the component itself using Tailwind's sr-only class.

<Button>
    <GearIcon />
    <span className="sr-only">Settings</span>
</Button>;

Should I create a new component or module?

Components could technically be used in any codebase and still feel at home. A module would only make sense in the Coder codebase.

Component
- Simple
- Atomic, used in multiple places
- Generic, would be useful as a component outside of the Coder product
- Good Examples: Badge, Form, Timeline
Module
- Simple or Complex
- Used in multiple places
- Good Examples: Provisioner, DashboardLayout, DeploymentBanner

Our codebase has some legacy components that are being updated to follow these new conventions, but all new components should follow these guidelines.

Styling

We use Emotion to handle CSS styles.

Forms

We use Formik for forms along with Yup for schema definition and validation.

Testing

We use three types of testing in our app: End-to-end (E2E), Integration/Unit and Visual Testing.

End-to-End (E2E) – Playwright

These are useful for testing complete flows like "Create a user", "Import template", etc. We use Playwright. These tests run against a full Coder instance, backed by a database, and allows you to make sure that features work properly all the way through the stack. "End to end", so to speak.

For scenarios where you need to be authenticated as a certain user, you can use login helper. Passing it some user credentials will log out of any other user account, and will attempt to login using those credentials.

For ease of debugging, it's possible to run a Playwright test in headful mode running a Playwright server on your local machine, and executing the test inside your workspace.

You can either run scripts/remote_playwright.sh from coder/coder on your local machine, or execute the following command if you don't have the repo available:

bash <(curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coder/coder/main/scripts/remote_playwright.sh) [workspace]

The scripts/remote_playwright.sh script will start a Playwright server on your local machine and forward the necessary ports to your workspace. At the end of the script, you will land inside your workspace with environment variables set so you can simply execute the test (pnpm run playwright:test).

Integration/Unit

We use unit and integration tests mostly for testing code that does not pertain to React. Functions and classes that contain notable app logic, and which are well abstracted from React should have accompanying tests. If the logic is tightly coupled to a React component, a Storybook test or an E2E test is usually a better option.

Visual Testing – Storybook

We use Storybook for testing all of our React code. For static components, you simply add a story that renders the components with the props that you would like to test, and Storybook will record snapshots of it to ensure that it isn't changed unintentionally. If you would like to test an interaction with the component, then you can add an interaction test by specifying a play function for the story. For stories with an interaction test, a snapshot will be recorded of the end state of the component. We use pixel-storybook to manage and compare snapshots in CI.

To learn more about testing components that fetch API data, refer to the Where to fetch data section.

What should I test?

Choosing what to test is not always easy since there are a lot of flows and a lot of things can happen but these are a few indicators that can help you with that:

Things that can block the user
Reported bugs
Regression issues

Tests getting too slow

You may have observed that certain tests in our suite can be notably time-consuming. Sometimes it is because the test itself is complex and sometimes it is because of how the test is querying elements.

Using `ByRole` queries

One thing we figured out that was slowing down our tests was the use of ByRole queries because of how it calculates the role attribute for every element on the screen. You can read more about it on the links below:

Even with ByRole having performance issues we still want to use it but for that, we have to scope the "querying" area by using the within command. So instead of using screen.getByRole("button") directly we could do within(form).getByRole("button").

❌ Not ideal. If the screen has a hundred or thousand elements it can be VERY slow.

user.click(screen.getByRole("button"));

✅ Better. We can limit the number of elements we are querying.

const form = screen.getByTestId("form");
user.click(within(form).getByRole("button"));

Frontend

Running the UI

Tech Stack Overview

Structure

Routing

Pages

Handling States

Data Fetching

Where to fetch data

API

Components and Modules

MUI

Structure

Accessibility

Should I create a new component or module?

Styling

Forms

Testing

End-to-End (E2E) – Playwright

Integration/Unit

Visual Testing – Storybook

What should I test?

Tests getting too slow

Using ByRole queries

Using `ByRole` queries