assay

Tools for experimenting with a website's UI code via a benevolent "man in the middle."

What it does:

1. Dynamically creates new websites to proxy existing websites
2. Each new website is accompanied by a “project” dashboard
3. Shows what traffic/requests is passing through the proxy
4. Collect options to guide future request handing behavior by the proxy

What it lets you do:

1. Replacing calls from one resource with a redirect to another. Examples uses include swapping one or more JS, CSS, HTML, or image file with another to see its impact on a site.
2. Multiple people to concurrently view and tinker with an “edited” site

What it could do...

if time were not such a cruel mistress

1. Enable easy experimentation on websites. For example: * Replacing image tags with HTML 5 responsive picture tags, or * Integrating some of the many optimizations outlined at modPageSpeed. * User defined scripts/mods
2. Offer other methods of file replacement
3. Caching
4. Online file editing
5. Cookie management for session sharing

Motivation

I created this project over the December 2016 holiday as an excuse to play around with technology that interests me. Some of the choices I made, like using Firebase, were made because I just wanted to play with that service or framework.

Setup

Prerequisites

1. Create a Firebase account

• Download the private credential JSON file, you will need to update the config.json file with its location later

2. Node JS is installed

• https://nodejs.org/
• Tested/developed with Node 7.4+

3. WebPack 2 installed globally

• Only required if changing & building the UI
• npm install webpack -g
• https://webpack.github.io/docs/tutorials/getting-started/

Installation

>git clone https://github.com/remento/assay.git
>cd assay
/assay>npm install

Configure

Update the project's config.json file with your Firebase account information. Take particular note to update the following three items:

• firebaseDatabaseURL
• firebaseCredentialPath
• clientConfig/firebaseConfig: {...}

Start the server

• Normal Server Startup

      node index.js --inspect
  

• Start Server In Debug Mode (Node 7+)

      node index.js --inspect
  

Building the UI

Not required unless the UI files in ./src/client have been modified.

• Dev UI build & start watching for changes (alias for webpack -d --watch)

  /assay>npm run dev
  

• Production UI build (alias for webpack -p)

  /assay>npm run build