3.2 KiB
Customization
You can modify your own Consul Democracy to have your custom visual style, but first you'll have to create your own fork from.
We've created an specific structure where you can overwrite and customize the application in a way that will let you keep updating it from Consul Democracy's main repository, without having conflicts on code merging or risking loosing your customization changes. We try to make Consul Democracy as vanilla as possible to help other developers onboard the codebase.
Special Folders and Files
In order to customize your Consul Democracy fork, you'll make use of some custom folders on the following paths:
app/assets/images/custom/app/assets/javascripts/custom/app/assets/stylesheets/custom/app/components/custom/app/controllers/custom/app/form_builders/custom/app/graphql/custom/app/lib/custom/app/mailers/custom/app/models/custom/app/models/custom/concerns/app/views/custom/config/locales/custom/spec/components/custom/spec/controllers/custom/spec/models/custom/spec/routing/custom/spec/system/custom/
There are also files where you can apply some customizations:
app/assets/javascripts/custom.jsapp/assets/stylesheets/custom.cssapp/assets/stylesheets/_custom_settings.cssapp/assets/stylesheets/_consul_custom_overrides.cssconfig/application_custom.rbconfig/environments/custom/development.rbconfig/environments/custom/preproduction.rbconfig/environments/custom/production.rbconfig/environments/custom/staging.rbconfig/environments/custom/test.rbGemfile_custom
Running the tests
When customizing the code, it is very important that all the tests in your test suite are still passing. If not, there will be issues when upgrading to a new version of Consul Democracy (or even when updating the custom changes) that won't be detected until the code is running on production. Consul Democracy includes more than 6000 tests checking the way the application behaves; without them, it'd be impossible to make sure that new code doesn't break any existing behavior.
So, first, make sure you've configured your fork so it uses a continuous integration system that runs all the tests whenever you make changes to the code. When changing the code, we recommend opening pull requests (a.k.a. merge requests) using a development branch so the tests run before the custom changes are added to the master branch.
Then, if some tests fail, check one of the tests and see whether the test fails because the custom code contains a bug or because the test checks a behavior that no longer applies due to your custom changes (for example, you might modify the code so only verified users can add comments, but there might be a test checking that any user can add comments, which is the default behavior). If the test fails due to a bug in the custom code, fix it ;). If it fails due to a behavior that no longer applies, check the tests customization section.
We also strongly recommend adding tests for your custom changes, so you'll have a way to know whether these changes keep working when upgrading to a new version of Consul Democracy.