Remix Indie Thin Stack

A thin Remix app without the data layer. Great for integrating with headless CMS

Learn more about Remix Stacks.

npx create-remix --template alvinthen/indie-thin-stack

or

yarn create remix --template alvinthen/indie-thin-stack

What's in the stack

• Fly app deployment with Docker
• Healthcheck endpoint for Fly backups region fallbacks
• GitHub Actions for deploy on merge to production and staging environments
• Email/Password Authentication with cookie-based sessions
• Styling with Tailwind
• End-to-end testing with Cypress
• Local third party request mocking with MSW
• Unit testing with Vitest and Testing Library
• Code formatting with Prettier
• Linting with ESLint
• Static Types with TypeScript

Not a fan of bits of the stack? Fork it, change it, and use yarn create remix --template your/repo! Make it your own.

Development

• Start dev server:

  yarn dev

This starts your app in development mode, rebuilding assets on file changes.

The mock API creates a new user with some data you can use to get started:

• Email: rachel@remix.run
• Password: racheliscool

Relevant code:

This is a pretty simple note-taking thin app relying on API. The main functionality is creating users, logging in and out, and creating and deleting notes.

• creating users, and logging in and out ./app/models/user.server.ts
• user sessions, and verifying them ./app/session.server.ts
• creating, and deleting notes ./app/models/note.server.ts

Deployment

This Remix Stack comes with two GitHub Actions that handle automatically deploying your app to production and staging environments.

Prior to your first deployment, you'll need to do a few things:

• Install Fly

• Sign up and log in to Fly

  fly auth signup

  Note: If you have more than one Fly account, ensure that you are signed into the same account in the Fly CLI as you are in the browser. In your terminal, run fly auth whoami and ensure the email matches the Fly account signed into the browser.

• Create two apps on Fly, one for staging and one for production:

  fly create indie-thin-stack-template
  fly create indie-thin-stack-template-staging

  • Initialize Git.

  git init

• Create a new GitHub Repository, and then add it as the remote for your project. Do not push your app yet!

  git remote add origin <ORIGIN_URL>

• Add a FLY_API_TOKEN to your GitHub repo. To do this, go to your user settings on Fly and create a new token, then add it to your repo secrets with the name FLY_API_TOKEN.

• Add a SESSION_SECRET to your fly app secrets, to do this you can run the following commands:

  fly secrets set SESSION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) --app indie-thin-stack-template
  fly secrets set SESSION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) --app indie-thin-stack-template-staging

  If you don't have openssl installed, you can also use 1password to generate a random secret, just replace $(openssl rand -hex 32) with the generated secret.

• Create a persistent volume for the sqlite database for both your staging and production environments. Run the following:

  fly volumes create data --size 1 --app indie-thin-stack-template
  fly volumes create data --size 1 --app indie-thin-stack-template-staging

Now that everything is set up you can commit and push your changes to your repo. Every commit to your main branch will trigger a deployment to your production environment, and every commit to your dev branch will trigger a deployment to your staging environment.

Getting Help with Deployment

If you run into any issues deploying to Fly, make sure you've followed all of the steps above and if you have, then post as many details about your deployment (including your app name) to the Fly support community. They're normally pretty responsive over there and hopefully can help resolve any of your deployment issues and questions.

GitHub Actions

We use GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment. Anything that gets into the main branch will be deployed to production after running tests/build/etc. Anything in the dev branch will be deployed to staging.

Testing

Cypress

We use Cypress for our End-to-End tests in this project. You'll find those in the cypress directory. As you make changes, add to an existing file or create a new file in the cypress/e2e directory to test your changes.

We use @testing-library/cypress for selecting elements on the page semantically.

To run these tests in development, run yarn test:e2e:dev which will start the dev server for the app as well as the Cypress client. Make sure the database is running in docker as described above.

We have a utility for testing authenticated features without having to go through the login flow:

cy.login();
// you are now logged in as a new user

We also have a utility to auto-delete the user at the end of your test. Just make sure to add this in each test file:

afterEach(() => {
  cy.cleanupUser();
});

That way, we can keep your local db clean and keep your tests isolated from one another.

Vitest

For lower level tests of utilities and individual components, we use vitest. We have DOM-specific assertion helpers via @testing-library/jest-dom.

Type Checking

This project uses TypeScript. It's recommended to get TypeScript set up for your editor to get a really great in-editor experience with type checking and auto-complete. To run type checking across the whole project, run yarn typecheck.

Linting

This project uses ESLint for linting. That is configured in .eslintrc.js.

Formatting

We use Prettier for auto-formatting in this project. It's recommended to install an editor plugin (like the VSCode Prettier plugin) to get auto-formatting on save. There's also a yarn format script you can run to format all files in the project.