Bootstrap Academy Backend

The official backend of Bootstrap Academy.

If you would like to submit a bug report or feature request, or are looking for general information about the project or the publicly available instances, please refer to the Bootstrap-Academy repository.

Development Setup

1. Install Nix with flakes enabled:
   • If you are on NixOS, just ensure that flakes are enabled by setting nix.settings.experimental-features = ["nix-command" "flakes"]; in configuration.nix.
   • If you are using a different Linux distribution or OS, we recommend using the Determinate Nix Installer.
2. Add your user to the trusted-users Nix option (replace YOUR_USERNAME with the actual name of the user account you use for development):
   • If you are on NixOS, set nix.settings.trusted-users = ["root" "YOUR_USERNAME"]; in configuration.nix.
   • If you are using a different Linux distribution or OS, add the line trusted-users = root YOUR_USERNAME to /etc/nix/nix.conf and run sudo systemctl restart nix-daemon.
3. Install direnv (optional, but strongly recommended):
   • If you are on NixOS, set programs.direnv.enable = true; in configuration.nix.
   • If you are using a different Linux distribution or OS, run the command nix profile install nixpkgs#direnv. Don't forget to install the shell hook (e.g. for bash run echo 'eval "$(direnv hook bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc).
4. Clone this repository and cd into it.
5. If you installed direnv, run direnv allow to automatically load the development environment when entering this repository. Otherwise you need to run nix develop --no-pure-eval manually each time to enter the development shell.
6. Run devenv up to start a local Postgres database, Valkey cache, SMTP server and some other services needed by the backend.
7. In a different terminal, you can now run cargo run -- serve. By default, the Swagger UI documentation is now available on http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs

Environment Variables

You can set the following additional environment variables to customize the development environment. If you use direnv, create a file with the name .env in the repository root with NAME=VALUE pairs on each line. Otherwise you need to set these variables manually.

• DEVENV_RUST: Set to 0 if you already have a Rust toolchain installed which you would like to use instead of the one provided by devenv.
• RUST_LOG: Set the tracing filter (log level). See the tracing-subscriber docs for details.
• RUST_LOG_PRETTY: Set to 0 to use the single-line instead of the multi-line log format.

VSCode Setup

For development in VSCode/VSCodium, simply open this repository, install the recommended extensions and confirm restarting the extensions after direnv successfully initialized.

Useful Commands

• psql: Connect to the local Postgres database
• valkey-cli: Connect to the local Valkey cache
• cargo run -- --help: List all commands provided by the backend CLI
• just: List all recipes provided by the justfile

Services

• The web interface of smtp4dev is available on http://localhost:5000/
• Various services for mocking external APIs are running on ports starting at 8001. See the logs of the testing-* services in devenv up for details.

Tests

This repository contains three different kinds of tests: Unit tests, integration tests and system tests.

Unit tests test only one unit (i.e. function in most cases) at a time and do not rely on any external systems. To run the unit tests, use the command just test-unit.

Integration tests are used to test the integration with other systems such as external APIs or databases. To run the integration tests, use the corresponding just recipes (e.g. to run the Postgres tests execute just test-postgres).

To run all unit and integration tests, use the command just test. It is also possible to generate coverage reports by replacing test with coverage in any of the previous commands.

System tests are used to test a production build of the backend in an environment that is as realistic as possible (with some exceptions). For that we use the NixOS test framework which spawns virtual machines containing a minimal NixOS system running the backend and then runs test scripts written in Python against these VMs. To run the system tests, use the command nix build -L .#tests.composite (if you are on darwin, you may need to set up a linux builder). You can also run individual system tests e.g. using nix build -L .#tests.user.