History lesson

When we think about the past, we talk about editing files directly on the server - without versioning, staging or anything similar. That was a mess! We nowadays live in a tech world with a lot of possibilities. That’s awesome. Let’s dive into our example stack for a JS project:

Hosting

Mostly we use AWS. Why?

• We have experience with most of the AWS products such as S3, Lambda, ECS etc.
• We do not want to host things by ourselves and maintain servers - that’s not our core business.
• For most of our clients it is important that their data is stored on servers in Germany. AWS has a datacenter in Frankfurt. ✔️
• We use the AWS organisations which gives us the possibility to create one account for each client and to get one receipt for each account, which makes very easy to send the bill directly to the client.

Stages

The first stage is our own developer machine, so let’s call it : Local 🤓 We are using git for our code versioning and also git-flow for our branching. This helps us also with our stages:

• Development: This is always our the copy or our develop branch. The stage can be broken and is mostly for quick tests and merge code from different developers
• Integration: Before a release is finished, we create an integration stage for QA to test all features. If everything is fine the stage will be shut down.
• Production: Everything here will be public to the world.

Tools, Code & Quality

Generally it’s every developers choice which editor to use. But we figured out that most of the plugins which made our life much easier are available on Visual Studio Code. So it is our favourite editor.

We are also using the following frameworks to improve our quality:

• Prettier: Auto format code according to our coding styleguide (at the moment the one developed by AirBnB is the favourite).
• ESLint: Shows syntactical issues directly while typing the code.
• Jest: If we need tests for our application, this is our favourite tool. It also enables us to define a minimum of test coverage.
• webpack: To optimize, minify etc. our code we are using webpack. Also for bundling the applications for each stage.
• Serverless: Configure our AWS stack with all resources, security settings etc. Very easy via Serverless.
• BitBucket Pipeline: Our code is hosted on BitBucket, we are using their pipeline to run all checks above and afterwards deploy if everything was successful.