Overleaf/services/web

web-sharelatex

web-sharelatex is the front-end web service of the open-source web-based collaborative LaTeX editor, ShareLaTeX. It serves all the HTML pages, CSS and javascript to the client. web-sharelatex also contains a lot of logic around creating and editing projects, and account management.

The rest of the ShareLaTeX stack, along with information about contributing can be found in the sharelatex/sharelatex repository.

Build process

web-sharelatex uses Grunt to build its front-end related assets.

Image processing tasks are commented out in the gruntfile and the needed packages aren't presently in the project's package.json. If the images need to be processed again (minified and sprited), start by fetching the packages (npm install grunt-contrib-imagemin grunt-sprity), then decomment the tasks in Gruntfile.coffee. After this, the tasks can be called (explicitly, via grunt imagemin and grunt sprity).

New Docker-based build process

Note that the Grunt workflow from above should still work, but we are transitioning to a Docker based testing workflow, which is documented below:

Running the app

The app runs natively using npm and Node on the local system:

$ npm install
$ npm run start

Ideally the app would run in Docker like the tests below, but with host networking not supported in OS X, we need to run it natively until all services are Dockerised.

Unit Tests

The test suites run in Docker.

Unit tests can be run in the test_unit container defined in docker-compose.tests.yml.

The makefile contains a short cut to run these:

make install # Only needs running once, or when npm packages are updated
make unit_test

During development it is often useful to only run a subset of tests, which can be configured with arguments to the mocha CLI:

make unit_test MOCHA_ARGS='--grep=AuthorizationManager'

Acceptance Tests

Acceptance tests are run against a live service, which runs in the acceptance_test container defined in docker-compose.tests.yml.

To run the tests out-of-the-box, the makefile defines:

make install # Only needs running once, or when npm packages are updated
make acceptance_test

However, during development it is often useful to leave the service running for rapid iteration on the acceptance tests. This can be done with:

make acceptance_test_start_service
make acceptance_test_run # Run as many times as needed during development
make acceptance_test_stop_service

make acceptance_test just runs these three commands in sequence.

During development it is often useful to only run a subset of tests, which can be configured with arguments to the mocha CLI:

make acceptance_test_run MOCHA_ARGS='--grep=AuthorizationManager'

Unit test status

License and Credits

This project is licensed under the AGPLv3 license

Stylesheets

ShareLaTeX is based on Bootstrap, which is licensed under the MIT license. All modifications (*.less files in public/stylesheets) are also licensed under the MIT license.

Artwork

Silk icon set 1.3

We gratefully acknowledge Mark James for releasing his Silk icon set under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. Some of these icons are used within ShareLaTeX inside the public/img/silk and public/brand/icons directories.

IconShock icons

We gratefully acknowledge IconShock for use of the icons in the public/img/iconshock directory found via findicons.com

Acceptance Tests

To run the Acceptance tests:

• set allowPublicAccess to true, either in the configuration file, or by setting the environment variable SHARELATEX_ALLOW_PUBLIC_ACCESS to true
• start the server (grunt)
• in a separate terminal, run grunt test:acceptance