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Table of Contents

• FormSG
  • Table of Contents
  • Contributing
  • Features
  • Local Development (Docker)
    • Prerequisites
    • First Setup
    • Running Locally
    • Accessing email locally
    • Environment variables
    • Trouble-shooting
  • Testing
    • Testing Prerequisites
    • Running tests
      • Unit tests
      • End-to-end tests
  • Architecture
  • MongoDB Scripts
  • Support
  • Acknowledgements

Contributing

We welcome all contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements, and ideas to code open sourced by the Government Technology Agency of Singapore. Contributors will also be asked to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to ensure that everybody is free to use their contributions.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO ALL CONTRIBUTORS

Before contributing, please read CONTRIBUTING.md. In particular, we strongly encourage contributors to please first discuss the change you wish to make via GitHub issue, email, or any other method with the repository owners beforehand. Otherwise, we may not be able to review or accept your PR.

Features

FormSG is a form builder application built, open sourced and maintained by the Open Government Products team of the Singapore Government Technology Agency to digitise paper processes.

Notable features include:

• 19 different form field types, including attachments, tables, email and mobile
• Verified email and mobile phone fields via integrations with Twilio and AWS SES
• Automatic emailing of submissions for forms built with Email Mode
• End-to-end encryption for forms built with Storage Mode
• (Singapore government agencies only) Citizen authentication with SingPass
• (Singapore government agencies only) Citizen authentication with sgID
• (Singapore government agencies only) Corporate authentication with CorpPass
• (Singapore government agencies only) Automatic prefill of verified data with MyInfo
• Webhooks functionality via the official FormSG JavaScript SDK and contributor-supported FormSG Ruby SDK

The current product roadmap includes:

• (in progress) Frontend rewrite from AngularJS to React
• Enabling payments on forms
• Electronic signatures
• Notifications to form admins for Storage mode submissions
• Integration with vault.gov.sg

Local Development (Docker)

Prerequisites

Install docker and docker-compose.

First Setup

To install the relevant npm packages, run the following in the root direcory:

npm install

To prevent breaking changes to webpack4 introduced in node 17 and above, enable the --openssl-legacy-provider flag:

export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider

If you are on Mac OS X, you may want to allow Docker to use more RAM (minimum of 4GB) by clicking on the Docker icon on the toolbar, clicking on the "Preferences" menu item, then clicking on the "Resources" link on the left.

Running Locally

Run the following shell commands to build the Docker image from scratch. This will usually take 10 or so minutes. These commands runs the backend services specified under docker-compose.yml and the React frontend on the native host.

npm run build:frontend
npm run dev

After the Docker image has finished building, the React application can be accessed at localhost:3000. The backend API server can be accessed at localhost:5001.

If there are no dependency changes in package.json or changes in the src/app/server.ts file, you can run

docker-compose up

which does not rebuild the Docker image from scratch. This command usually only takes ~15 seconds to finish starting up the image.

Adding dependencies

Run npm install as per usual.

For backend, run

docker-compose up --build --renew-anon-volumes

which will rebuild the backend Docker image and not reuse the existing node_modules volume.

As frontend project is currently not using Docker, no other steps are required.

Accessing email locally

We use MailDev to access emails in the development environment. The MailDev UI can be accessed at localhost:1080 when the Docker container runs.

Environment variables

Docker-compose looks at various places for environment variables to inject into the containers. The following is the order of priority:

• Compose file
• Shell environment variables
• Environment file
• Dockerfile

FormSG requires some environment variables to function. More information about the required environment variables are in DEPLOYMENT_SETUP.md.

We provide a .template-env file with the secrets blanked out. You can copy and paste the variables described into a self-created .env file, replacing the required values with your own.

Trouble-shooting

You can consult TROUBLESHOOTING.md for common issues that developers face and how to resolve them.

Testing

The docker environment has not been configured to run tests. Thus, you will need to follow the following local build guide to get tests running locally.

Testing Prerequisites

The team uses macOS for development.

Make you sure have the following node version & package manager on your machine:

• "node": ">=18.12.1"
• "npm": ">=8.19.2"
• "mongo": ">=4.0.0"

Run

nvm install 18
npm install
pip install "localstack[full]"

to install node modules and Localstack locally to be able to run tests. Note that localstack[full] is only compatible with Python 3.7 and above.

Running tests

Unit tests

npm run test

will build the backend and run our backend unit tests. The tests are located at __tests__/unit/backend.

If the backend is already built, you can run

npm run test-ci

Frontend tests are located at frontend/__tests__. They can be run with

npm run test:frontend

End-to-end tests

npm run test-e2e

will build both the frontend and backend then run our end-to-end tests. The tests are located at __tests__/e2e. You will need to stop the Docker dev container to be able to run the end-to-end tests.

If you do not need to rebuild the frontend and backend, you can run

npm run test-e2e-ci

Cross-browser testing

This project is tested with BrowserStack.

Architecture

The architecture overview is here.

MongoDB Scripts

Scripts for common tasks in MongoDB can be found here.

Support

Please contact FormSG (support@form.gov.sg) for any details.

Acknowledgements

FormSG acknowledges the work done by Arielle Baldwynn to build and maintain TellForm, on which FormSG is based.

Contributions have also been made by:
@RyanAngJY
@jeantanzy
@pregnantboy
@namnguyen08
@zioul123
@JoelWee
@limli
@tankevan