ECL Watch Development

There are several approaches to creating a development environment for ECL Watch, this page focuses on two of the common approaches

Remote Server / Local Development (no webpack)

Normal development setup with a remote server and local (client) development machine

• Build + Deploy a HPCC-Platform to a remote server (or VM) via the usual mechanisms.
• On the local client machine (Windows / OSX / Linux) ensure you have NodeJS 8.x (LTS) installed:

https://nodejs.org/en/

• Clone the HPCC Platform Sources from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/hpcc-systems/HPCC-Platform.git
cd HPCC-Platform
git submodule update --init --recursive

• Navigate to the ECL Watch source folder (esp/src) and install the third party dependencies

cd ./esp/src
npm install

• Compile the local TypeScript files to JavaScript

npm run compile

• Configure the target server in lws.config.js:

const debugServerIP = "192.168.3.22";

• Start the development server:

npm run start:dev

• Open a web browser and navigate to the development server:

http://localhost:8080/stub.htm?nopack=1

Continuous Integration (with webpack)

This method continuously monitors the source files for changes and rebuilds the production packages as needed. In this example the setup is a single Linux machine used for running a HPCC-Platform instance and developing the ECL Watch sources.

• Build + Deploy a HPCC Platform to the target Linux machine.
• On the same machine ensure you have NodeJS 8.x (LTS) installed:

https://nodejs.org/en/

• Clone the HPCC Platform Sources from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/hpcc-systems/HPCC-Platform.git
cd HPCC-Platform
git submodule update --init --recursive

• Navigate to the ECL Watch source folder (esp/src) and install the third party dependencies

cd ./esp/src
npm install

• Compile the local TypeScript files to JavaScript and create the initial build:

npm run build

• Delete the current ECL Watch distribution:

sudo rm -rf /opt/HPCCSystems/componentfiles/files/dist/

• Create a symlink from the local build folder to the ECL Watch distribution (your source path may be different):

sudo ln -s ~/git/HPCC-Platform/esp/src/build/dist /opt/HPCCSystems/componentfiles/files/dist

• Monitor the local files for changes:

npm run bundle-watch

• Open the ECL Watch page as normal:

http://192.168.3.22:8010