Using gulp to set the value of Rt106_SERVER_URL from environment vari…

[sarachan]

…able Rt106_SERVER_HOST. This eliminates the need to rebuild the Docker image to run on a different machine and not have the browser on localhost.

[millerjv]

I do not understand the changes to the two config.js files. It looks like all that changed is removing whitespace and deleting the Copyright notice.

Env Var should just be Rt106_SERVER_URL not Rt106_SERVER_HOST.

I usually see gulp being run as part of npm (action to a target in package.json), not as part of one's node.js code.

[sarachan]

When gulp-ng-constant modifies config.js, it tries to interpret the copyright notice in some way, resulting in garbled stuff in the file. It was best to remove the copyright notice, because it seems to confuse the processing of gulp-ng-constant.

I used Rt106_SERVER_HOST as the environment variable to specify the hostname only. Internally to the code the full URL is set to the variable Rt106_SERVER_URL. These are slightly different.

Gulp is a node.js extension and does run as node.js code. It could be a standalone utility that does nothing other than the gulp functions or as part of an application. Let me know if you have a specific alternative organization in mind.

[millerjv]

I think of gulp (and grunt) as part of the build tools. As such, I would add the gulp script as an npm target that prepares the configuration for running. I'd add a script entry to package.json to create the config.js files. Then I would change entry point to call both the nom config target and the npm start target. Or have the npm start script do the config operation and then start the server. If we are going to add a script runner, we should compare gulp and grunt. I think the env variable should be the full url. Otherwise we force people to use http and port 80. As for the existing config.js files in the repos, do they need to be in the repo at all? Couldn’t gulp/grunt generate the entire file?

[sarachan]

I had briefly compared gulp and grunt by reading a few online comparisons. There seemed to be a slight community preference for gulp, which is newer, but I did not investigate the comparison exhaustively.

We may not need the static config.js files because they are generated. In fact, I had it set up that way for a while. I added them for the case of mounting the rt106-app directory for local development, but perhaps that would work anyway... I did not test that without the static config.js.