FFC AHWR Farmer Claim

Web frontend for the farmer claim journey

Prerequisites

• Access to an instance of an Azure Service Bus.
• Access to an instance of an Azure Storage Account. This could be an actual account or Azurite, a storage emulator
• Docker
• Docker Compose

Optional:

• Kubernetes
• Helm

Environment variables

The following environment variables are required by the application. Values for development are set in the Docker Compose configuration. Default values for production-like deployments are set in the Helm chart and may be overridden by build and release pipelines.

Name	Description
APPLICATIONREQUEST_QUEUE_ADDRESS	Name of message queue used to send application requests
APPLICATIONRESPONSE_QUEUE_ADDRESS	Name of session enabled message queue used to receive application responses
MESSAGE_QUEUE_HOST	Azure Service Bus hostname, e.g. myservicebus.servicebus.windows.net
MESSAGE_QUEUE_PASSWORD	Azure Service Bus SAS policy key
MESSAGE_QUEUE_SUFFIX	Developer initials
MESSAGE_QUEUE_USER	Azure Service Bus SAS policy name, e.g. RootManageSharedAccessKey
SERVICE_URI	URI of service (used in links, in emails) e.g. http://localhost:3000 or https://defra.gov.uk
AZURE_STORAGE_CREATE_CONTAINERS	Set true to use connection string, false to connect using azure credentials for blobstorage

Running the application

The application is designed to run in containerised environments, using Docker Compose in development and Kubernetes in production (a Helm chart is provided for production deployments to Kubernetes).

Configuration and secret data are held in Azure Key Vault and populated during the deployment to non-local environments.

Build container image

Container images are built using Docker Compose, with the same images used to run the service with either Docker Compose or Kubernetes.

When using the Docker Compose files in development the local app folder will be mounted on top of the app folder within the Docker container, hiding the CSS files that were generated during the Docker build. For the site to render correctly locally npm run build must be run on the host system.

By default, the start script will build (or rebuild) images so there will rarely be a need to build images manually. However, this can be achieved through the Docker Compose build command:

# Build container images
docker-compose build

Start

Use the start script to run the service locally which in turn uses Docker Compose.

Test structure

The tests have been structured into subfolders of ./test as per the Microservice test approach and repository structure

Running tests

A convenience script is provided to run automated tests in a containerised environment. This will rebuild images before running tests via docker-compose, using a combination of docker-compose.yaml and docker-compose.test.yaml. The command given to docker-compose run may be customised by passing arguments to the test script. The original test script was influenced by any local .env file present, and the values within that could change the results of tests being run unexpectedly. Therefore we now have a wrapper which prevents this happening by moving the file if it exists, called scripts/testlocal

Examples:

# Run all tests
scripts/testlocal

# Run tests with file watch
scripts/testlocal -w

CI pipeline

This service uses the FFC CI pipeline