Splitting the Firefox Health dashboard
Back in January I had to make a critical decision. I had to determine if to separate the Firefox health dashboard (formely known as Platform health) into a backend and frontend projects or to keep it together.
The intent was to make it easier to maintain the project by reducing the complexity of having code that is presentational versus processing code. I also wanted to remove the boilerplate needed for webpack and babel. It was also beneficial to have the liberty of changing packages without worrying of regressing the frontend or the backend. The only disadvantages was to have to do the work and that we might need in the future coordinated changes (or versioned APIs). We did not see the disadvantage of code being duplicated since there wasn’t any (or much — I can’t recall now) shared between the two apps.
This all came from hitting a very odd production specific issue. I thought this was all caused from the complex webpack configuration the project had. Because we were not making progress determining the root issue I decided to switch to Neutrino. Switching to Neutrino made everything easier, however, it was unclear how to make it work with the original project’s design. The original design had the frontend files being served as static assets of the Koa app. Switching to Neutrino took away webpack headaches since it makes good default configuration options for the project.
Keeping both frontend and backend apps within the same repository complicated the deployment story since there were some Heroku restrictions. I tried using subtrees, however, it still required manual intervention (see explanation). I didn’t know at the time that we could have deployed the backend to Heroku while deploying the frontend to Netlify. This would have allowed to keep both project within the same repository. Alas! We now have two repositories.
If you want to look at the code changes you can see them here.
