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Hacking on OCaml.org

Setup and Development

Setting up the Project

Before starting to hack you need a properly configured development environment. Linux and macOS are supported and used daily by the core team. System dependencies include:

The project Dockerfile contains up-to-date system configuration instructions, as used to ship into production. It is written for the Alpine Linux distribution but is meant to be adapted to other environments such as Ubuntu, macOS+Homebrew or others. The GitHub workflow file .github/workflows/ci.yml also contains useful commands for Ubuntu and macOS. Since ocaml.org is mostly written in OCaml, a properly configured OCaml development environment is also required, but is not detailed here. Although Docker is used to ship, it is not a requirement to begin hacking. Currently, ocaml.org doesn't yet compile using OCaml 5, version 4.14 of the language is used. It is possible to run workflow files in .github/workflows using the nektos/act tool. For instance, run the following command to run the CI checks run by GitHub on each pull request (where ghghgh is replace by an ad-hoc GitHub token, see: https://github.com/nektos/act#github_token)

act -s GITHUB_TOKEN=ghghgh .github/workflows/ci.yml -j build

The Makefile contains many commands that can get you up and running, a typical workflow will be to clone the repository after forking it.

git clone https://github.com/<username>/ocaml.org.git
cd ocaml.org

Ensure you have opam installed. Opam will manage the OCaml compiler along with all of the OCaml packages needed to build and run the project. By this point we should all be using some Unix-like system (Linux, macOS, WSL2) so you should run the opam install script. There are also manual instructions for people that don't want to run a script from the internet. We assume you are using opam.2.1.0 or later which provides a cleaner, friendlier experience when installing system dependencies.

With opam installed you can now initialise opam with opam init. Note in containers or WSL2 you will have to run opam init --disable-sandboxing. Opam might complain about some missing system dependencies like unzip, cc (a C compiler like gcc) etc. Make sure to install these before opam init.

Finally from the root of your project you can setup a local opam switch and install the dependencies. There is a single make target to do just that.

make switch

If you don't want a local opam switch and are happy to install everything globally (in the opam sense) then you can just install the dependencies directly.

make deps

Opam will likely ask questions about installing system dependencies, for the project to work you will have to answer yes to installing these.

Running the server

After building the project, you can run the server with:

make start

To start the server in watch mode, you can run:

make watch

This will restart the server on filesystem changes.

Running tests

You can run the unit test suite with:

make test

Building the Playground

The OCaml Playground is compiled separately from the rest of the server and the generated assets can be found in playground/asset/.

You can build the playground from the root of the project, there is no need to move to the ./playground/ directory for the following commands.

To regenerate the playground, you need to install the playground's dependencies first:

make deps -C playground

After the dependencies have been installed, simply build the project to re-generate the JavaScript assets:

make playground

Once the compilation is complete and successuful, the newly generated assets have to be git committed in ocaml.org and merged as a pull request.

Deploying

Commits added on some branches are automatically deployed:

The deployment pipeline is managed in https://github.com/ocurrent/ocurrent-deployer which listens to the main and staging branches and builds the site using the Dockerfile at the root of the project. You can monitor the state of each deployment on deploy.ci.ocaml.org

To test the deployment locally, you can run the following commands:

docker build -t ocamlorg .
docker run -p 8080:8080  ocamlorg

This will build the docker image and run a docker container with the port 8080 mapped to the HTTP server.

With the docker container running, you can visit the site at http://localhost:8080/.

The docker images automatically build from the live and staging branches, and are then pushed to Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/ocurrent/v3.ocaml.org-server

Staging Pull Requests

We aim to keep the staging branch as close as possible to the main branch, with only a few PRs added on top of it.

The maintainers will add your pull request to staging if it is worthwhile to do so. For example, documentation PRs or new features where we need testing and feedback from the community will generally be live on staging for a while before they get merged.

Managing dependencies

ocaml.org is using an Opam switch which is local and bound to a pinned commit in opam-repository. This is intended to protect the build from upstream regressions. The Opam repository is specified in three (3) places:

Dockerfile
Makefile
.github/workflows/*.yml

When bringing up ocaml.org to a newer pin, the commit hash found it those files must be changed all at once.

Once the opam repo pin is updated, the local switch must be updated using the following command:

opam repo set-url pin git+https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository#<commit-hash>

Where <commit-hash> is the pinned hash specified in the files mentioned above.

Repository structure

The following snippet describes the repository structure.

.
├── asset/
|   The static assets served by the site.
│
├── data/
|   Data used by ocaml.org in Yaml and Markdown format.
│
├── playground/
│   The source and generated assets for the OCaml Playground
│
├── src
│   ├── global
│   │   Project wide definitions
│   │
│   ├── ocamlorg_data
│   │   The result of compiling all of the information in `/data` into OCaml modules.
│   │
│   ├── ocamlorg_frontend
│   │   All of the front-end code primarily using .eml files (OCaml + HTML).
│   │
│   ├── ocamlorg_package
│   │   The library for constructing opam-repository statistics and information (e.g. rev deps).
│   │
│   └── ocamlorg_web
│       The main entry-point of the server.
│
├── tool/
│   Sources for development tools such as the `ocamlorg_data` code generator.
│
├── dune
├── dune-project
│   Dune file used to mark the root of the project and define project-wide parameters.
│   For the documentation of the syntax, see https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/dune-files.html#dune-project.
│
├── ocamlorg.opam
├── ocamlorg.opam.template
│   opam package definitions.
│
├── CONTRIBUTING.md
│
├── Dockerfile
│   Dockerfile used to build and deploy the site in production.
│
├── LICENSE
├── LICENSE-3RD-PARTY
│   Licenses of the source code, data and vendored third-party projects.
│
├── Makefile
│   `Makefile` containing common development commands.
│
├── README.md
│
└── tailwind.config.js
    Configuration used by TailwindCSS to generate the CSS file for the site.