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WEB & CMS Integration

This Drupal site acts solely as a CMS and Content API for the Front-End Website Generator. The actual website for va.gov is powered by the vets-website repo.

The WEB project is built on Metalsmith. The project consumes the Drupal CMS GraphQL endpoint and generates static files for VA.gov.

CMS & WEB Unity

In order to fully test and stabilize the WEB building process as it consumes CMS content, we need to build the WEB project in the CMS-CI system, and be able to pin the version we are working with.

There a number of components that allow us to build the WEB project inside the CMS build process:

  • Add WEB as a composer "package", with its version defined in the CMS composer.json's "repositories" section.
  • Require the mouf/nodejs-installer package. This tool automatically installs executable versions of Node and NPM at the specific version we set in composer.json.
  • Add to composer.json's "scripts" section (post-install-cmd), to kick off "yarn build" and "npm build" commands after composer install.
  • Add Composer commands (See composer.json's "scripts" section) to faciitate building and rebuilding the WEB project.

Developing WEB and CMS Together

Change branch or SHA of WEB

CMS developers can change the version of the WEB project they want with standard composer commands:

# Use a specific SHA
ddev composer require va-gov/web:dev-master#7b4c87257cfc9b5e684c4ba7ddca283efbc4329d
# Use a specific branch
ddev composer require va-gov/web:dev-branch_name

Then followup with a ddev composer update --lock and ddev composer va:web:build will build the front-end with the new hash.

Rebuild WEB from a local CMS

There is a composer command to rebuild the WEB front-end static files from a locally running Drupal site:

composer va:web:build

This command will regenerate the HTML and CSS for the entire site, and will put it into ./docroot/static.

If using ddev, you can load it using https://va-gov-cms.ddev.site/static

NOTE: We are working on a method to load this content from a root url, like http://va-gov-web.ddev.site

Rebuild WEB from a CMS-CI Environment

The CMS-CI system rebuilds the PR sites, including WEB every time code is pushed via git.

If team members wish to rebuild WEB manually, they may log into the CMS preview, go to the "Release Content" page, and press the "Release content" button.

Screenshot of "Release content" Button

Build CMS PR Environment for WEB PR

If a WEB developer has an open PR (or just commits) and wants to get a PR environment with the CMS and the WEB code, they can open a PR in the va.gov-cms repository:

  1. Fork the va.gov-cms repository.
  2. Determine the SHA of the WEB code you want to test.
  3. Put that SHA into the "reference" field in composer.json, as described above.
  4. Visit Create Pull Request page of the CMS repo, and describe your intentions.
  5. Wait for the Deployment notification to give you a link to your new site.

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