Contributing to Meshery UI

UI Contribution Flow

Meshery is written in Go (Golang) and leverages Go Modules. UI is built on React and Next.js. To make building and packaging easier a Makefile is included in the main repository folder.

Architecture

The following is a list of top-level frameworks, libraries, design system used in Meshery UI.

• NextJS - Server and router
• ReactJS - User Interface library
• Material UI - Design System
• BillboardJS - Charting library, used for exposing Grafana and Prometheus-collected metrics
• CytoscapeJS - a visualization tool for canvas-based, visual topology (networks)

Meshery Server APIs

Go here for the docs.

REST API

• Meshery provides a REST API available through the default port of 9081/tcp.
• List of endpoints (spreadsheet) a simple, static list of REST API endpoints with short description of their purpose.
• Swagger / Open API.
• Collection of sets of REST API docs that Meshery server exposes to clients (like the Meshery UI).

GraphQL API

• Meshery provides a GraphQl API available through the default port of 9081/tcp.
• Relay is the client used.

Design

Wireframing / Mockups

• Meshery UI in Figma

Fill-in a community member form to gain access to community resources. You need to ask for the access to the above Figma File in Slack

Design Prologue

Meshery UI is a significant component of the value proposition Meshery offers to individuals and organizations seeking to adopt and operate a service mesh or collection of service meshes.

Design Goals

The designs in this specification should result in enabling:

• User experience should be intuitive

  This is achieved through sensible defaults, consistency of user interaction paradigms and features that delight the user.

• Meshery UI should simplify user management of workloads and service meshes

  Meshery UI needs to be simple, but powerful. This is achieved through intuitive layouts and predefined filters that accommodate common tasks.

• Extensible

  Meshery UI should be a first-class component of Meshery, but also facilitate third-party integrations.

Design Objectives

The designs in this specification should result in enabling:

• Meshery UI should be event-driven where possible.

Setup

Linting-UI

• When contributing to this project, it is advisable to

  • Use eslint plugin for Visual Studio Code.

  • Disable plugins other than eslint for formatting and linting, if any.

Install UI dependencies

To install/update the UI dependencies:

make ui-setup

Build and export UI

To build and export the UI code:

make ui-build

Now that the UI code is built, Meshery UI will be available at http://localhost:9081 when Meshery Server is running (Read below).

Changes are not recompiled directly, you will have to run to rebuild the UI to see them

Run Meshery Server

To start running Meshery Server locally:

$ make server

Now, Meshery will run on the default port http://localhost:9081.

UI Development Server

If you want to work on the UI, it will be a good idea to use the included UI development server. You can run the UI development server by running the following command:

make ui

Refer to Contributing to Meshery Server, if needed.

Make sure to have Meshery Server configured, up and running on the default port http://localhost:9081 before proceeding to access and work on the UI server at http://localhost:3000.

Any UI changes made now will automatically be recompiled and served in the browser.

Running Cypress integration tests

To run cypress integration tests, a convenience make target called run-ui-integration-tests that installs dependencies in /ui and /provider-ui folders as prerequisite and invokes ci-test-integration npm script found in /ui/package.json

   
     $ make run-ui-integration-tests
   

Refer to Meshery Cypress Testing for details of how to contribute and benefit from Meshery Cypress (integration & end-to-end) testing.

Running Meshery from IDE

All of the above steps would get the Meshery’s development server running for you to work on in any IDE of your choice.

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