@hint/utils-create-server

Create Server (@hint/utils-create-server)

Create a server to run tests

Installation

To install the package, you need to run:

npm install @hint/utils-create-server

Architecture

The test web server is spawned in a new thread. There reasons for this are:

• Better isolation
• Improve the debugging experience

With the current architecture knowing what is actually returned by the server is easier because a web browser can be used while debugging the code. Before if the code hit a breakpoint the webserver would be blocked as well and nothing will be returned.

There main 2 pieces are:

• index.ts: This is what modules consume. It is in charge of spawning the server process and handle the communication with it. All methods are async to achive this.
• server.ts: The real web server. It uses express and listens to the messages sent by index.ts.

The communication between both is done via IPC. Each message sent by index.ts needs a response to confirm the action has been completed, i.e. if it sends a start message it should receive a start message as well.

The following is an example of messages used:

{
    "webhint": {
        "type": "start"
    }
}

Please note that all messages are "scoped" to webhint to avoid collision with other possible messages.

IPC serializes the messages to JSON. Unfortunatelly it does not accept replacer/reviver functions. The server configuration accepts Buffers so in order to send the right data we need to manually (de)serialize the messages in both ends.