A Guardian discussion and asset sharing app for editorial story development, integrated with our key editorial tools such as Composer (news stories) and the Grid (images).

This project is written pretty much exclusively in TypeScript (both frontend & backend) and is entirely serverless (server side is a set of lambdas plus AWS AppSync) except the database which is an RDS Postgres instance.

We use yarn workspaces to break up the project into different sub-projects...

• bootstrapping-lambda
• client
• auth-lambda
• notifications-lambda
• users-refresher-lambda
• workflow-bridge-lambda
• database-bridge-lambda
• grid-bridge-lambda
• archiver-lambda
• email-lambda
• cdk

... PLUS a shared directory for sharing constants and logic between the other sub-projects.

There's also a shared top level tsconfig.json (which is then extended in the sub-project, e.g. to configure react in the client sub-project).

To avoid the burden of maintaining lots of dependencies across all the different tools, PinBoard takes a different approach, where we add a <script tag to the various tools (e.g. in composer), which hits the bootstrapping-lambda on the /pinboard.loader.js endpoint (which is explicitly NOT cached) which performs some auth checks before returning some javascript code - this approach facilitates super-fast deploys (when compared to a browser extension or releasing libraries then having to release all the host platforms with library bump).

To see how all this fits together see the Architecture Diagram.

Run ./scripts/setup.sh, which...

• configures dev-nginx (according to dev-nginx.yaml)
• ensures all dependencies are installed

• Ensure you have the latest AWS credentials (profile: workflow)
• Run ./scripts/start.sh
• to check it's up, hit https://pinboard.local.dev-gutools.co.uk (to see the PinBoard floaty etc. on a blank page - having gone through the auth and permission checks - if you don't see anything take a look at the console in the browser)

NOTE: locally it uses the CODE AppSync API instance (since AppSync is a paid feature of localstack)

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/19ckVsYpa4nEzSHxJTcB5_4yiXNztIngZdMUZLqb2HIM/edit

ADRs can be found in ADRs directory, worth highlighting...

• database

After making any changes to shared/graphql/schema.graphql, run yarn graphql-refresh in the root of the project. This will regenerate shared/graphql/graphql.ts, which contains the TypeScript type and resolver definitions to match the GraphQL schema. We use GraphQL Code Generator to generate these definitions and this is configured in graphql-refresh.yml.

This generation step is run for you as part of the setup.sh, start.sh and ci.sh scripts.

Note, shared/graphql/schema.graphql is also used in CDK to form part of the Cloudformation.

Occasionally you may want to test the GraphQL queries/mutations directly from the AWS Console. You for which you will need an auth token, you can generate these by running yarn generate-appsync-auth-token in the root of the project and selecting CODE or PROD from the prompt.