heliosian/docs/dev.md

Local development

Toolchain prerequisites: see setup.md.

Run

go run .

The server listens on http://localhost:8080 (override with PORT). Templates, static assets, and sample data are read from disk on every request — edit a file and refresh the browser; no restart needed.

Auth

Everything — pages, static assets, and the API — sits behind Google sign-in restricted to the school's Google Workspace domain. Unauthenticated requests get the login page (API paths get a 401). The OAuth 2.0 Web application client (authorized JavaScript origins must include http://localhost:8080 for local development) is read from creds/oauth-client.json — the JSON downloaded from the Cloud console — or from GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID when set; the server refuses to start with neither. After Google sign-in the server issues its own HMAC-signed session cookie; set SESSION_KEY to keep sessions valid across restarts and instances (without it each start generates a random key).

To capture authenticated pages with the screenshot tooling, launch the capture browser (go run ./tools/capturebrowser), sign in to the local server there once, and use tools/browse or tools/screenshot -remote — the session cookie lives in the capture profile. Plain tools/screenshot runs a fresh headless browser with no session and captures the login page.

Local data

The server reads local data from sampledata/, mirroring the production Sheets layout: one directory per app, one CSV file per table, first row is the schema. It goes through the same data-source interface production backends implement, so app code never knows which backend it is talking to.

Real data

DIRECTORY_SHEET=<spreadsheet id> go run .

switches the directory app to the Google Sheets source. At startup the directory tables are read from the spreadsheet and normalized into the in-memory data model (see docs/data.md); the server refuses to start if that load fails, and the model reloads every five minutes. Requires the service account key at creds/service-account.json (the directory is gitignored) with the Sheets API enabled and the spreadsheet shared read-only with the service account. Real data never leaves the process: nothing is written to disk.

Layout

• main.go — server entry point and app routing
• internal/data — data source interface and the CSV sample-data implementation
• internal/directory — directory app handlers
• web/directory — directory app page templates and static assets
• tools/screenshot — dev-site page capture, see screenshots.md
• tools/columns — print the column names of each directory table in the configured source