Like a ton of other people I was recently inspired by listening to Lex Fridman interview Peter Levels. Hearing him speak about the current state of development made me want to simplify.

This is @levelsio “most controversial take” but I totally agree with him pic.twitter.com/RVRfttW2vt

— Sarah 👩🏼‍🍳👩🏼‍💻 (@chfsrh) August 21, 2024

I was trying out fly.io for an app that I was working on but it was yet another platform to learn, will probably fall out of fashion, and was kinda pricey for what I wanted to use it for. I have already messed around with:

• heroku
• netlify
• vercel
• others

And those are great for high availability and horizontal scaling but....I don't have those problems and those platforms can get expensive quick compared to having your own VPS and running your apps on it. Granted, I'm familiar with servers and docker. If you're not then by all means use those services. They're great for that. However, since I have that experience, use a wide range of technologies for different apps, then docker with my VPS makes a lot of sense to me. It also helps that it's relatively easy to find Dockerfiles for various frameworks.

Why Docker?

I prefer to not mess around with server packages and updates if I don't have to. It scares me doing that stuff in production. Using docker means I can easily run apps that need varying versions of php, node, python, etc and I don't have to worry about getting all those pieces in place directly on my server. If I just used php and no framework like Peter then I probably wouldn't bother with docker.

Let's go

I just had to figure out how to come up with a github action workflow to deploy to my server. Here's what I came up with. This does require some server set up(below).

The workflow deletes all but the last three images stored on github and on my server so I'm not paying for those on github and not chewing through disk space on my server.

Server setup

First, create a github user account with docker permissions on your server:

sudo useradd -m github
sudo usermod -aG docker github

And created a ssh key/pair for the github user:

# change to github user
sudo su - github

# generate ssh key/pair
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"

Next, copy the contents of /home/github/.ssh/id_rsa.pub into /home/github/.ssh/authorized_keys and fix the permissions if necessary:

chmod 600 /home/github/.ssh/authorized_keys

Next create the required repository secrets here:

https://github.com/<your-username>/<repository-name>/settings/secrets/actions

The following secrets should be created:

SERVER_HOST=<your servers hostname or ip>
SERVER_SSH_KEY=<the contents of the private key: /home/github/.ssh/id_rsa>
SERVER_USERNAME=github

The deploy script also assumes your container needs env vars set and those should be created in a /home/github/yourappsname.env file. It also assumes the container uses port 3000 and should forward to the same port on the host.

You can then add nginx in front of it if you've configured a domain's DNS to point to your server. Create an A record if using an ip as the value and the domain as the name. Ex: yourappsname.com.

# /etc/nginx/conf.d/yourappsname.conf
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourappsname.com www.yourappsname.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }
}

Reload nginx:

nginx -s reload

And then use certbot to add an ssl certificate:

certbot --nginx -d yourappsname.com -d www.yourappsname.com

Result

Now I have a pretty good template to follow to deploy whatever apps I decide to build and not be charged a crazy amount by hosting providers. The only hosting I'm using is a fixed price Hetzner VPS I can resize if/when I need to.

Next steps

Postgres has been my database of choice but I think I want to simplify to just using sqlite and see how far that gets me. A lot of the things I want to build are hobby projects with potential to make money. I don't want to pay for fancy db hosting for these apps. There are some database providers that have free plans but I haven't come across any that offer free backups and that's something I do want. I plan to use docker volumes to store the sqlite database on my VPS host and then start with cron-based backups and then use litestream if I ever feel the need to go down that path.

I've been having some FOMO with Remix and Next.js lately. The company I work for was contracted to develop the frontend UI for an internal application of a large public business. I lead that development. I've been in this position for this same app for years now. They wanted a single page app that they could host and serve statically. They have people on their side doing the development of the api's that the frontend will be consuming. We started the app using react router v3 and have upgraded it to v6 now. We've also gone through an evolution of using redux/redux-thunk and now react-query for our data fetching.

I've recently been given the opportunity to start the UI development of a new application and although the requirements are the same in that it needs to be a SPA, I was excited to use react router's new data utilities: loaders, actions, and fetchers...and then I realized just how awkward these things are in a single page application.

In this post I'm going to describe what I find awkward and then describe the approach I've decided to use on this new application. I hope this helps other devs and comes across as constructive criticism and useful feedback for the Remix team. I have a ton of respect for those folks. I love react router and am very grateful for the work that's been put into it.

Route loaders

I dig route loaders. The idea that the router can fetch each active route's data in parallel to avoid waterfalls makes a lot of sense to me. You fetch the minimal amount of data for each route here. If certain data isn't immediately integral to a particular route, then you can go ahead and render it and fetch the other data after the route component is rendered. Beautiful.

Dominik(aka tkdodo) has an excellent post on how to incorporate react query and react router. I highly recommend giving that a read. queryClient.ensureQueryData() FTW!

Fetchers

This is where things start to get weird. Fetchers are used to make requests to apis without triggering navigations. For example, fetching options for autocomplete/combobox inputs would be an appropriate use case for a fetcher. It's similar to react-query's useQuery and useMutation hooks.

What I have found awkward is that you must go through the router to use these. React router wants to be able to invalidate these requests after successful action submission. That doesn't sound so bad but let's look at what's required to make a fetcher work.

Let's pretend we're implementing a combobox where a list of cities populate as options as the user types. At a minimum this is what our router could look like:

So what's awkward with this?

First off, we're defining a sort of "virtual" route. It doesn't really exist. You can't go to /cities in the browser and get that data because this is a single page app. This works as expected with Remix. You can go to /cities and get that data back. With react router you get an error about the route not returning an element. This makes sense. React router has no way to actually return a Response to the browser with the Content-Type: application/json header set.

Second, we can't just make requests directly from our route element to the endpoint that we need. We have to go through the fetcher api which means using fetcher.load() or fetcher.submit() which means we are beholden to either using search params or FormData. I'd guess the vast majority of the api's people are consuming in react router apps are using json or graphql. We have the mental overhead of conceptualizing two requests: one to the router and one to the api endpoint we actually care about. In the example above, we use a contains search param because that's the simplest way to pass the data. However, the api endpint we're using uses json. We have to juggle this request through react router using different content types to make it work.

Third, if you're using react router's actions you must implement the /cities route's shouldRevalidate if you don't want the router to retrigger this after a successful action:

Fourth, if you have some data you want to fetch that's not crucial at initial route render, the recommendation is to use useEffect to trigger that.

The is less than ideal because it triggers the fetch twice when being run in strict mode. When you're hacking on your app, you'll see two network requests due to this. Is it really a problem? The fetcher will appropriately handle the responses and give you the response from the second request but I think this makes it harder to find legitimate bugs, where your code could be errantly making duplicate requests. That said, it is a recommended approach seen in the reactjs docs.

You also have to reach for useEffect when the fetcher.data lands like to do things like focus an input or set some state based on that data.

There are just too many odd nuances and indirections with fetchers for me to want to use them.

defer

We might be encouraged to use the defer utility in the loader. The concept is pretty slick. It really let's you pull the lever up and down on the data you need right away vs a bit later. However, it comes with some rough edges as well.

If you're using typescript and were previously casting the loader data like this:

That's now broken. defer returns an instance of DeferredData but in your component, what gets returned is an object that contains promises. You end up having to add some more indirection:

Additionally, to use this promise you'll need to use the Await render prop component which, like fetchers, doesn't come with any onSuccess or onError callbacks to make use of.

The issues I've discussed here with defer and Await aren't unique to react router/SPA's but I thought worth mentioning.

Actions

With react router and Remix, we're told to "use the platform". This translates to using search params and FormData and leaning into uncontrolled form inputs so you don't have to manage form state and it supports progressively enhanced forms...if you're using Remix. Not so much with react router since there is no server component to handle form submissions.

Are progressively enhanced forms good? Absolutely...in certain contexts. When I'm using just react router to build a private internal app for ~50 users all located in a single major city, progressively enhanced forms are just not relevant. If you're building apps for millions of users that are all over the world being used by all sorts of devices, that's a different story. I have never worked on one of those applications. I fully understand that using just react router eliminates progressively enhanced forms. I don't want to be beholden to its implications in the apps I'm building. Thanks, but I'll opt out of the hard mode that is adhering to progressively enhanced form restrictions but not actually progressively enhanced.

So what's my beef with its "implications"? Just like fetcher to load data, you are forced to use "the platform"'s apis: URLSearchParams and FormData. This means you're encouraged again to go through an awkward layer but this time it's html and FormData. I realize this sounds kinda ludicrous. Html is awkward? Yes, using it as the source of truth is. Hear me out.

If we're going to use the recommended approach, a form component could like something like this:

Even though my form elements are mimicking different data types(string, boolean, number), FormData doesn't care. Everything you formData.get() out is a string. We're responsible for coalescing that back into the appropriate types for our api endpoint.

Also notice that since we're modeling our data in markup we have no type safety there. Hopefully you, or your editor, will catch typos such as the fact that the Favorite Number input's name is misspelled.

This gets even more awkward if you're modeling objects and arrays.

The "easiest" way I've found to do this is to use a special input naming syntax, employees[1][name], and then use a package like qs to parse it out from request.text(), not request.formData().

This is case #2 in coming up with solutions to internal problems to become a more valuable developer.

Case #2: API Documentation

At my current job, we are contracted to develop an internal frontend application for a fortune 500 company. The employees of this company must interact with several applications to do their jobs. The application I lead the frontend development for aims to alleviate that; to have one place for the employees to go to do their work. The application will then communicate with those different applications behind the scenes via api requests. The backend is composed of several different expressjs applications that are all brought together via a webserver. We, the frontend team, just need to interact with a single http port to make our requests against.

Example:

• https://<current-domain>:8080/api/foo -> get's proxied to the "foo" service
• https://<current-domain>:8080/api/bar -> get's proxied to the "bar" service

Each of these api services are developed by different teams within our client company.

Emulation

Developing within this company's network requires VPN access and that comes with a whole host of challenges. Instead, we've set up a mock expressjs server to develop against locally. This allows us to not have any dependency on their backend development environment. All we need is api documentation. We don't need to wait for these apis to actually be developed and deployed. We can just take the api documentation they've provided and create mock endpoints and responses within our express app to develop against. This is really nice because we have complete control over everything and can develop against various responses for any given endpoint(think error responses).

Receiving api documentation

We were/are being given "api documentation" in pretty much any and all formats:

• emails
• .txt documents
• Word documents
• power points
• slack messages

Because the backend consists of several teams maintaining their own api services, there is no "standard" way of giving us api documentations. We have attempted to get this client to provide api documentation in a specific format but because we're just a vendor, we really have no control over them. We just take what we're given and put it in our express app. Because of this, and the fact that they do not maintain any sort of central api documentation, our mock express app has become the only central "api documentation" in existence for their api services.

The problems

At the time, our mock express app contained ~700 unique endpoints. There were a few problems I noticed:

Discarding request payloads

When adding mock POST/PUT endpoints, we were just making them repond with the expected success response, totally disregarding the request payloads.

app.post('/thing-service/thing', (req, res) => {
  return res.json({message: "Created thing successfully!"})
})

After we developed the frontend to send the expected payload based on the api docs we were sent, that request documentation was essentially gone. We'd have to search for when and where those api docs were sent if we ever needed to view them again.

Inability to search

The next problem was that the only "documentation" we had was our express app code which was very hard to search just due to the size it had grown and the inability to exclude search terms from the hardcode responses. We didn't really have a good way to search on urls. If we searched for "thing", that could show up in url patterns or, more commonly, in the hardcoded respones making it really difficult to find anything.

Clumsy and tedious

If we wanted to test various respones from a specific endpoint we'd have to go find it and then hardcode in a new response. This is a very manual and tedious task. Often we would end up losing the original response, which was still valid, because we'd overwrite it to test a new response.

The Solution

I wanted a way to:

• keep various potential responses
• keep request POST/PUT payloads
• easily send/receive api documentation
• easily explore all ~700 endpoints
• keep our mock express app

Route files

That's when I took inspiration from Swagger(which I find very confusing to get started).

My first thought was to identify the most relevant pieces of data for any given endpoint:

• url pattern
• http method
• request payloads - if applicable
• query params - if applicable
• responses
  • success responses
  • error responses

Luckily this is all stuff that can be encapsulated in a json file, which I know our backend api counterparts are comfortable with(as opposed to something like yaml).

{
  "title": "Create thing for username",
  "path": "/thing-service/:username/thing",
  "params": {
    "username": {
      "value": "johndoe",
      "help": "The owner's username"
    }
  },
  "method": "POST",
  "payload": {
    "thing": {
      "name": "Foobar",
      "color": "Blue"
    }
  },
  "responses": [
    {
      "status": 200,
      "response": {
        "message": "Thing created successfully!"
      }
    },
    {
      "status": 400,
      "response": {
        "errors": [
          {
            "detail": "Invalid color submitted"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

I could define several of these route files and then write code in my express app to:

• glob a certain directory for these route files
• parse them into javascript objects
• iterate over them and create functioning endpoints for each

import glob from 'glob'
import express from 'express'

const app = express()

app.get('/foo/bar', (req, res) => {
  return res.json({foo: "bar"})
})

// all the other ~700 routes

const routes = glob
  .sync('api-routes/**/*.json')
  .map(require)

for (const route of routes) {
  app[route.method](route.path, (req, res) => {
    const firstResponse = route.responses[0]
    return res.json(firstResponse)
  })
}

const PORT = process.env.PORT || 8080
app.listen(PORT, function () {
  console.log('Dev Express server running at localhost:' + PORT)
})

This was great! I instantly solved several problems. I communicated to my backend counterparts that I would strongly prefer them to document their apis in these json route files. All I had to do was get the routes files and dump them in my api-routes directory and they'd instantly be avaible to develop against!

UI for the route files

I still wanted to solve searching and make reading these route files easier though. That's when I decided this documentation needed a user interface. The initial idea was pretty simple:

• add an api endpoint to the mock server that
  • get's a list of existing endpoints on the express app instance(method, and url pattern)
  • get all routes from files
  • combine those to come up with a single list of known routes with as much information as possible
  • respond with that list of routes
• create a react app to consume that endpoint and render documentation for the routes
• serve that react app on a mock server endpoint

This whole thing seemed like it would shedding light on my existing express app so it seemed appropriate to call it "headlamp". Link to repo here. It started to take shape. Because I had a complete list of all the routes defined in the frontend, it was trivial to add searching by url pattern and http method.

Clicking on an endpoint would expand to show everything known about the endpoint...along with a few other added features...

Some features I added:

• ability to actually submit the request and see the response in the UI and in the browser's network tab
• ability to toggle different responses directly from the ui
  • we can now toggle the error response on and test that in our application UI
• ability to submit and activate adhoc json responses
  • makes it incredibly easy to debug things if we know a certain production response is causing an issue
• ability to search url patterns by omitting the route param names if you can't remember those
  • searching "/thing-service/:/thing" would find /thing-service/:username/thing
• attempts to find where this endpoint is being used in the source code (see "References" section in the screenshot above)
• shows the location of the route file if this endpoint was created from one
• responds with headers to show
  • what route file is responsible for this request
  • a link to where you can view this request's UI documentation

(Disregard the fact that the link points to a different port than what's in the browser url. This is just a result of running headlamp in development mode to hack on it. It points to the same port when used normally.)

• ability to use .js route files and create dynamic responses. See third code snippet here.
• ability to expand the references to view the acual source code of where this endpoint is used

• ability to upload HAR files if you need to emulate a specific sequence of responses actually encountered in production

Result

This case of scratching our own itch has been immensely helpful and made our development experience so much nicer and more productive than interacting with an express app manually.

Our client now asks us how they can run this to view their own api's documentation.

Is the headlamp code the best, most organized, test-driven developed code out there? Absolutely not, nor does it need to be. This was an internal tool developed to make our own lives easier. It is serving its purpose extremely well for us. I haven't needed to touch it for almost 2 years now and we've used it every day since its inception.

Looking for ways to keep your work interesting while at the same time improving your productivity? Take the time to assess your current development challenges. View them as opportunities to come up with effective solutions. I thoroughly believe this is a solid approach to proving your worth and advancing your career.

Fun fact: At the time of writing this our mock express app now has 1298 unique endpoints.

Link to headlamp