Tools

Sentry

Sentry is used to catch and track errors in the application.

Backend

We use Sentry for error collection for both frontend and backend applications. Setting it up is very easy, you just need to register an account on https://sentry.io and make environments for your servers + applications. We usually have 2 per server (1 for frontend, 1 for backend)

To use Sentry follow these steps:

create an environment for an application (eg: DEV BACKEND) get the DSN (SENTRY_DSN) for your new environment and place it in the corresponding .env file in the application folder on the deployed application. (eg. django/.env) rebuild and restart your docker containers and you are ready to go.

Frontend

To log errors into Sentry the proper DSN has to be set in .env SENTRY_DSN key.

The nuxt/sentry modul automatically reports error and exception. It also provides a global object ($sentry) by which custom events can be captured.

this.$sentry.captureMessage('Un-caught validation error in project page', {
  level: 'error',
  extra: {
    apiErrors: this.apiErrors,
    errors,
  },
})

For further options, please refer to the official documentation.

Circle CI

For our own and even for the open source repository we use CircleCI for CI and CD.

There are 2 official repositories followed by CircleCI:

  • https://github.com/unicef/invent - official open source repository, uses CI only

  • https://github.com/pulilab/TIIP - all our current development goes here first, uses CI+CD

The configuration file for Circle is located in .circleci/config.yml in the repo.

Job descriptions

There are several jobs within our configuration, like build-and-test, deploy-dev, e2e-dev, deploy-qa and two workflows build-and-deploy and build-and-test-only. Let’s go through these one by one.

Job: build-and-test

This is the main job of CI, specifically to install requirements for both frontend and backend applications and then run the test suites, coverage and check for missing migrations.

Job: deploy-dev

Using the fabric script, it deploys current dev branch to DEV server. The host of the DEV server is set on CircleCI as an env var.

DEV_HOST_STRING - Host of DEV (eg: user@host.com)

Job: deploy-qa

Using the fabric script, it deploys a tag or a tagged release to QA server. The host of the QA server is set on CircleCI as an env var.

QA_HOST_STRING - Host of QA (eg: user@host.com)

Job: e2e-dev

Runs Cypress E2E tests and saves screenshots and videos of failed tests. (Currently not in use)

Workflow: build-and-deploy

This workflow is only used for the https://github.com/pulilab/TIIP repo (hence the filters).

Workflow: build-and-test-only

This workflow is used for every fork except the original https://github.com/pulilab/TIIP repo (hence the filters).