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Eternaltwin Integration

This section describes how to integrate Eternaltwin into your project's repository. Integrating Eternaltwin to your repository allows you to run and test your project using a locally installed version of the Eternaltwin website.

Eternaltwin is installed as a project-local Node package:

  • it ensures all the contributors use the same version
  • the project is fully self-contained and does not require an internet connection to run
  • if you have multiple projects on your computer, there are no conflicts: each one has its own Eternaltwin version.

The packaged version is not the full website (for example, it does not include translations). It's a lightweight version specifically intended to be installed inside other projects.

System requirements

You need the following tools on your system:

If your system is not a 64-bit Linux or Windows, you also need Rust to complete the installation by compiling part of the package. If you have a 64-bit Linux or Windows, Rust is optional.

ℹ Using npm as an alternative to yarn is not officially supported but should work.

Configure your repository for Node packages

Your repository must contain a package.json file at its root. It is a manifest file containing metadata for Node.js.

If your project does not have a package.json, you may create one by running the following command at the repo root and replying to the prompts:

yarn init .

You may read the Yarn or npm documentation if you wish to learn more about package.json files.

Below is an example minimal package.json file.

{
  "name": "myproject",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "licenses": [
    {
      "type": "AGPL-3.0-or-later",
      "url": "https://spdx.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0-or-later.html"
    }
  ],
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {},
  "dependencies": {},
  "devDependencies": {}
}

Make sure to commit the package.json file.

Install Eternaltwin inside your project

Run the following command in the directory containing package.json:

yarn add --dev @eternal-twin/cli

This will perform the following 3 actions:

  1. Update your package.json file to document the new dependency on the package @eternaltwin/cli.
  2. Download the package (and its own dependencies) into the node_modules directory.
  3. Create (or update) a yarn.lock file to remember the exact version of the dependencies that were installed and prevent accidental regressions.

Commit the package.json and yarn.lock files.

Do not commit the node_modules directory: add the node_modules/ rule to your .gitignore file.

You now have to update your package.json file to expose the etwin command. Add the entry "etwin": "etwin" to the scripts config in your package.json. The resulting package.json should be similar to:

{
  "name": "myproject",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "licenses": [
    {
      "type": "AGPL-3.0-or-later",
      "url": "https://spdx.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0-or-later.html"
    }
  ],
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "etwin": "etwin"
  },
  "dependencies": {},
  "devDependencies": {
    "@eternal-twin/cli": "^0.10.3"
  }
}

⚠ The package was previously named @eternal-twin/website or @eternal-twin/cli, it was renamed to @eternaltwin/cli. Make sure you use the right package.

Configure Eternaltwin

Before you can run Eternaltwin, you must configure it.

ℹ There is an open issue to allow Eternaltwin to run without any configuration file.

The Eternaltwin configuration is loaded from a file named etwin.toml.

This file may contain configuration specific to your local machine and as such should not be stored in Git. The recommended strategy to configure Eternaltwin is the following:

  1. Create a file named etwin.toml.example.
  2. Copy the official example configuration (raw) into etwin.toml.example. You do not need to customize the config yet.
  3. Add the etwin.toml rule to your .gitignore, commit the file etwin.toml.example
  4. Update your project setup documentation: contributors should copy the file etwin.toml.example into etwin.toml manually.
  5. Copy your etwin.toml.example file into etwin.toml.

Start Eternaltwin

Once Eternaltwin is installed and configured, you can run it from anywhere inside your repo using the following command:

yarn etwin

This command starts the local Eternaltwin server on your computer. You can use this server to test your project.

When starting, the server displays the configuration it is using. You can use this information to troubleshoot your configuration.

By default, the server uses the port 50320 and is available at the address http://localhost:50320/.

Other commands

yarn etwin provides a couple subcommands:

  • yarn etwin start: Start the dev version of the website (default command, that's why yarn etwin also starts the website)
  • yarn etwin db check: Check the state of the Postgres database used by the dev website if configured to use the postgres mode
  • yarn etwin db create: Initialize an empty database
  • yarn etwin db upgrade: Upgrade an existing database to the latest schema version

Next steps

Now that your repo is configured to run Eternaltwin, you may start to actually integrate your project with Eternaltwin. The first step would be to use Eternaltwin to manage user accounts through OAuth.