Open Event Webapp generates static websites of the event fed to it in the form of JSON data. Earlier, we used to automatically deploy the FOSSASIA Summit event website on the Github pages of the repository on every merge of a pull request.  The presence of it helped in showcasing and testing purposes. But a single event was not enough. Events are diverse, taking place in a large number of rooms, h a variety of sessions and extending over several days. So, having multiple events on the showcase site and continuously showcasing and testing them was a really great idea.

Here is the feature request for it. I will be explaining the major portions of it. The whole code can be found here

First of all, we need to build the main index page which we will showcase our sample events. It will contain the small images of the event and on clicking them, the selected event will be opened. For displaying features and capability of the generator,  we have two separate sections of events: one having the single session page and the other having the expandable sessions page. There will be links to the other components of the Open Event Ecosystem like Android App generator,  Web App generator, Organizer App, and Eventyay.

The contents of that page are kept in the overviewSite folder. It contains the event background images of the events and the main index file. The basic structure of the file is shown below. The whole file can be viewed here

<div class="container-fluid bg-3 text-center">
 <div class="row margin">
   <div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 col-xs-12">
     <div class="row">
       <h2 class="margin"> Apps with expandable sessions page </h2>
       <div class="col-md-6 col-sm-6 col-xs-12 margin">
         <p><strong>Open Tech Summit 2017</strong></p>
         <a href='./OpenTechSummit/index.html' target='_blank'>
           <img src="./otssmall.jpg" class=""  alt="Image">
         </a>
       </div>
      </div>
    </div>
   <div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 col-xs-12">
     <div class="row">
       <h2 class="margin"> Apps with single sessions page </h2>
       <div class="col-md-6 col-sm-6 col-xs-12 margin">
         <p><strong>Mozilla All Hands 2017</strong></p>
         <a href='./MozillaAllHands2017/index.html' target='_blank'>
           <img src="./mozilla_banner.jpg" class=""  alt="Image">
         </a>
       </div>
     </div>
   </div>
 </div>
</div>

But, this is just the front end of the page. We haven’t generated the sample events yet and neither have we made any changes to make them auto deploy on each PR merge. The test script of the app which contains unit, acceptance and selenium tests runs on each PR made against the repo when Travis CI build is triggered. So, it makes sense to write code for generating the event there itself. When the test script has finished executing, all of the events would have been generated and present inside a single folder named a@a.com (We needed something short and easy to remember and the name doesn’t really matter). We then copy the contents of the overviewSite folder into the above folder. It already contains the folder of different sample events.

Here is the related code. The full test script file can be found here

describe('generate', function() {
 describe('.create different event sites and copy assets of overview site', function() {
   // Sample events are generated inside the a@a.com folder
   it('should generate the Mozilla All Hands 2017', function(done) {
     var data = {};
     // API endpoint configuration of the All Hands 2017 event and the session style set to single pages
     data.body = {
       "email": "a@a.com",
       "name": "Open Event",
       "apiendpoint":    "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fossasia/open-event/master/sample/MozillaAllHands17",
       "sessionMode": "single",
       "datasource": "eventapi",
       "assetmode" : "download"
     };
     generator.createDistDir(data, 'Socket', function(appFolder) {
       assert.equal(appFolder, "a@a.com/MozillaAllHands2017");
       done();
     });
   });
   // For copying the static files required for the showcase site
   it('should copy all the static files', function(done) {
     var staticPath = __dirname + '/../src/backend/overviewSite/';
     function copyStatic(fileName) {
       // Copy the static files in the overviewSite folder to the a@a.com folder
     }
   });
 });
});

Everything is almost done now. We then just make some changes in the deploy script to publish the whole folder containing the different event samples instead of a particular sample and everything works fine.

We navigate to the a@a.com folder inside the dist directory and initialize a git repository there. We then set the username and email and fetch the contents of the gh-pages branch of the official repo (using the Github token. It is defined in the Travis Settings as a private environment variable) and reset it. We then add all the files present in the current directory to the staging area, commit them and push it to the upstream repository. Here is the relevant code. The whole github deploy script file can be viewed here

eval cd dist/a@a.com/
git init
git config --global user.name "Travis CI"
git config --global user.email "noreply+travis@fossasia.org"
git remote add upstream "https://$GH_TOKEN@github.com/"${TRAVIS_REPO_SLUG}".git"
git fetch upstream
git reset upstream/gh-pages
touch .
git add -A .
git commit -m "rebuild pages at ${rev}"
git push -q upstream HEAD:gh-pages

Here is the screenshot showing the successful deployment of the sample events. You can view the whole log here. A screenshot of it is below. You can view the higher quality image by clicking on it.

After all the work, this is how the showcase page looks like. Samples are re-generated and the site is auto-deployed on every Pull Request merged in the repository.

On clicking on any of the listed events, we jump to the index page of that particular event. Like, If we click on the Facebook Developer Conference, a new tab is opened and we are taken to the front page of that event!

References

• MochaJs:
  https://mochajs.org
• Github Auto Deployment: http://www.steveklabnik.com/automatically_update_github_pages_with_travis_example/