@commercetools-frontend/mc-http-server

@commercetools-frontend/mc-http-server

This package contains the HTTP server to run a Custom Application in production.

This server should only be used for production, for development we use @commercetools-frontend/mc-scripts to start a development server.

Install

$ npm install --save @commercetools-frontend/mc-http-server

Docker image

We also provide a docker image to run the server:

$ docker run -p 3001:3001 eu.gcr.io/ct-images/mc-http-server:v0.0.0 mc-http-server

Why do we need an HTTP Server?

Since a Single Page Application consists of mainly JavaScript bundles and CSS, it's usually not necessary to have an actual HTTP server running. In theory it's enough to serve a static HTML page, for example from a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

However, the Custom Application requires certain information and configuration which cannot be provided on build time. This information is available at runtime through environment variables, which needs to be dynamically injected into the index.html.

For that reason, before the server starts, we process the index.html.template that was previously generated on build time, containing references to the JavaScript bundles. Additionally, there are some placeholders variables that are replaced with the values from the application config. After that, the final index.html file is written on disk and ready to be served by the HTTP server.

All static assets are served from the public folder.

Additional responsibilities

Besides generating and serving the index.html, the HTTP server does additionally a couple of things:

• gathers /metrics for Prometheus
• provides a /version endpoint with the current revision hash (git SHA)