Article Templates for Mobile Apps

Article templates used within the Guardian’s next-generation iOS and Android applications. This repo also contains documentation that describes the components and layouts used across these templates.

Requirements

• A Mac or Linux computer.
• NVM.
• NodeJS. Install using nvm: nvm install v10.17.0. Remember to add nvm use v10.17.0 to your preferred shell startup file.
• You may need to install npm globally npm install -g npm.
• It is recommended you restart your shell to ensure changes added the startup file are applied.

Developing

Clone

$ git clone git@github.com:guardian/mobile-apps-article-templates.git

Install

$ cd mobile-apps-article-templates
$ npm install

• If you get an error on this step regarding lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/promise-retry/index.js or another module, running npm install -g npm and re-running npm install may fix it.

Running on iOS simulator

• Checkout the branch you are developing against
• Run npm run build
• Checkout the ios-live project
• Edit the package.json file in the root of ios-live, replacing the version of the @guardian/mobile-apps-article-templates dependency with the relative path of the local templates repo:

"dependencies": {
    "@guardian/mobile-apps-article-templates": "file:../mobile-apps-article-templates"
}

• You will then need to run npm install in the ios-live directory that contains the package.json in the repo.
• If you find that the app is not using the expected version of the dependency (from your branch), try deleting package-lock.json and node_modules before running npm install.

Running on Android simulator

• Checkout the branch you are developing against
• Run npm run build
• Checkout the android-news-app/ project
• Edit the package.json file in android-news-app/android-news-app/, replacing the version of the @guardian/mobile-apps-article-templates dependency with the relative path of the local templates repo:

"dependencies": {
    "@guardian/mobile-apps-article-templates": "../../mobile-apps-article-templates"
}

• You will then need to run npm install in the android-news-app/android-news-app directory that contains the package.json in the repo.

Building from S3 (iOS or Android)

• Find the branch you want to test on teamCity
• Click run to build the branch and upload to s3
• You can find the s3 package in bundle-url.txt under artifacts

Update your package.json:

"dependencies": {
    "@guardian/mobile-apps-article-templates": "https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds.gutools.co.uk/guardian-mobile-apps-article-templates-v1.0.190.tgz"
}

NPM scripts

NPM will provide the following services:

• npm run test runs the JS unit tests from the test/spec/unit/ directory
• npm run build builds JS/CSS assets, used on CI environment for building assets
• npm run dev builds JS and CSS (with source maps).
• npm run release generates a changeset file, which makes changesets to create a release pull request when the PR is merged

Publish to npm repository

This repository has changed to changesets to publish the package to NPM package.

• In your feature branch, run npm run release to generate the changeset file. We usually just bump the patch version number.
• Add the changeset file generated undder .changeset directory, commit and push to github
• When your PR is merged, the github action for CI will create a release pull request (example)
• You can merge this release pull request if you want to publish the package to npm repository.
• Alternatively, you may leave the release pull request open. If other PR are merged, their change sets will just be added to this release pull request.

Example templates

These are examples of the main templates used across apps: