Working with the React UI

This file explains how to work with the React-based Thanos UI.

Introduction

The React-based Thanos UI was was bootstrapped using Create React App, a popular toolkit for generating React application setups. You can find general information about Create React App on their documentation site.

Instead of plain JavaScript, we use TypeScript to ensure typed code.

Development environment

To work with the React UI code, you will need to have the following tools installed:

• The Node.js JavaScript runtime.
• The Yarn package manager.
• Recommended: An editor with TypeScript, React, and ESLint linting support. See e.g. Create React App's editor setup instructions. If you are not sure which editor to use, we recommend using Visual Studio Code. Make sure that the editor uses the project's TypeScript version rather than its own.

NOTE: When using Visual Studio Code, be sure to open the pkg/ui/react-app directory in the editor instead of the root of the repository. This way, the right ESLint and TypeScript configuration will be picked up from the React workspace.

Installing npm dependencies

The React UI depends on a large number of npm packages. These are not checked in, so you will need to download and install them locally via the Yarn package manager:

yarn

Yarn consults the package.json and yarn.lock files for dependencies to install. It creates a node_modules directory with all installed dependencies.

Running a local development server

You can start a development server for the React UI outside of a running Thanos server by running:

yarn start

This will open a browser window with the React app running on http://localhost:3000/. The page will reload if you make edits to the source code. You will also see any lint errors in the console.

Due to a "proxy": "http://localhost:10902" setting in the package.json file, any API requests from the React UI are proxied to localhost on port 10902 by the development server. This allows you to run a normal Thanos Query server to handle API requests, while iterating separately on the UI.

[browser] ----> [localhost:3000 (dev server)] --(proxy API requests)--> [localhost:10902 (Thanos)]

Running tests

Create React App uses the Jest framework for running tests. To run tests in interactive watch mode:

yarn test

To generate an HTML-based test coverage report, run:

CI=true yarn test --coverage

This creates a coverage subdirectory with the generated report. Open coverage/lcov-report/index.html in the browser to view it.

The CI=true environment variable prevents the tests from being run in interactive / watching mode.

See the Create React App documentation for more information about running tests.

Linting

We define linting rules for the ESLint linter. We recommend integrating automated linting and fixing into your editor (e.g. upon save), but you can also run the linter separately from the command-line.

To detect and automatically fix lint errors, run:

yarn lint

This is also available via the react-app-lint-fix target in the main Thanos Makefile.

Building the app for production

To build a production-optimized version of the React app to a build subdirectory, run:

yarn build

NOTE: You will likely not need to do this directly. Instead, this is taken care of by the assets target in the main Thanos Makefile when building the full binary.

Integration into Thanos

To build a Thanos binary that includes a compiled-in version of the production build of the React app, change to the root of the repository and run:

make build

This compiles in all web assets into the Thanos binary.

Note that make build only compiles static assets using bindata.go, if you are working on React UI, make sure you run make assets to update pkg/ui/bindata.go