frontend-app-catalog

The catalog is a frontend-base application: a library that plugs into the Open edX frontend shell, rather than a standalone micro-frontend bundled with its own webpack build.

Purpose

The catalog serves the public-facing Home, Course About, and Course Catalog pages — the intended replacement for the corresponding legacy views in edx-platform.

Branches and Releases

This app is published to NPM by semantic-release, and its branches follow OEP-10 ADR 0002:

master

Unstable. Every merge publishes a prerelease on the alpha dist-tag. Breaking changes land here with no DEPR process and no warning, so it is not supported in production. All changes, including bug fixes, should target this branch first.

stable

Carries the newest stable major and owns the latest dist-tag. Changes arrive here as backports from master, and no breaking change lands after publication.

n.x and n.m.x

Maintenance branches for majors and minors that stable has moved past. Each owns the dist-tag matching its own name, so consumers select a maintained line by semver range, e.g. "1.x".

stable has not been cut yet: until this app is first ready for production use, master and its alphas are all there is. Both .releaserc and the Release CI workflow already know the whole layout, including the maintenance branch patterns, so a new line starts publishing as soon as it is pushed.

This repository is no longer branched or tagged for Open edX releases in its own right. It participates by published version instead, per OEP-10 ADR 0003.

The micro-frontend this app replaces goes on living on legacy-mfe, which is where any further release/RELEASENAME branches for it are cut, for as long as a supported release still ships it.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

A running Open edX instance is needed to serve this app's backend APIs. Tutor in development mode is the usual choice, and site.config.dev.tsx already points at its default hostnames.

Unlike a micro-frontend, this app is neither built nor served by tutor-mfe. The dev server below runs on the host.

Cloning and Startup

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/openedx/frontend-app-catalog.git

2. Use the version of Node specified in the .nvmrc file.

   Using other major versions of Node may work, but is unsupported. This repository includes an .nvmrc file to help set the correct Node version via nvm.

3. Install npm dependencies:

   cd frontend-app-catalog && npm install

4. Start the dev server:

   npm run dev

The dev server defaults to PORT=1998 PUBLIC_PATH=/catalog (set in the dev script in package.json) and is available at http://apps.local.openedx.io:1998/catalog.

Configuration used by the dev server is defined in site.config.dev.tsx at the repo root.

Local Development Against frontend-base

To develop this app and a local checkout of frontend-base in tandem, use the built-in npm workspace support:

mkdir -p packages/frontend-base
sudo mount --bind /path/to/frontend-base packages/frontend-base
npm install
npm run dev:packages

Bind mounts are used instead of symlinks because Node resolves symlinks to their real paths, which breaks hoisted dependency resolution. When you are done, unmount with sudo umount packages/frontend-base.

Configuration

The catalog app declares the following AppConfig fields (defaults live in src/app.ts). Sites can override any of them by spreading over catalogApp.config in site.config.*.tsx:

Field	Purpose
ENABLE_COURSE_DISCOVERY	Show the Discover / Explore links in the header.
ENABLE_PROGRAMS	Show the Programs link in the header.
ENABLE_COURSE_SORTING_BY_START_DATE	Enable start-date sorting in the catalog search.
HOMEPAGE_COURSE_MAX	Maximum number of courses to render on the homepage list (default 9).
HOMEPAGE_PROMO_VIDEO_YOUTUBE_ID	YouTube video id for the homepage promo video.
NON_BROWSABLE_COURSES	When truthy, hides catalog links for authenticated users.
INFO_EMAIL	Support email address shown on the catalog error page.
SUPPORT_URL	URL of the support / help page linked from the catalog.
LEARNING_BASE_URL	Base URL for course-outline links from the course-about page.
COURSE_ABOUT_TWITTER_ACCOUNT	Twitter handle used by the course-about sidebar's share widget.

See site.config.dev.tsx in this repo for a worked example of overriding these for local development.

Slots

This app offers a number of slots for operators to customize its pages. See src/slots/ for the current list and per-slot READMEs with usage examples.

Developing

Project Structure

The layout follows the standard frontend-base app layout:

• src/app.ts — the app configuration imported by site.config.*.tsx.
• src/constants.ts — the app's appId and role identifiers.
• src/index.ts — the package's public exports (this is a library).
• src/routes.tsx — the app's react-router routes.
• src/Main.tsx — the root component for the app's routes.
• src/slots.tsx — the slot operations the app applies to the shell.
• src/slots/ — the slots this app offers to consumers.
• src/style.scss — app-scoped runtime styles.

For more, see the frontend-base migration how-to.

Build Process Notes

Library build

npm run build compiles the library into dist/ via tsc and tsc-alias. This is what gets published and consumed by sites.

CI build

npm run build:ci runs openedx build against site.config.ci.tsx so webpack traverses the full app graph. This catches issues (like broken lazy-loaded imports) that tsc and Jest would not surface.

Internationalization

Please refer to the frontend-base i18n howto for documentation on internationalization.

Getting Help

If you're having trouble, we have discussion forums at https://discuss.openedx.org where you can connect with others in the community.

Our real-time conversations are on Slack. You can request a Slack invitation, then join our community Slack workspace. Because this is a frontend repository, the best place to discuss it would be in the #wg-frontend channel.

For anything non-trivial, the best path is to open an issue in this repository with as many details about the issue you are facing as you can provide.

https://github.com/openedx/frontend-app-catalog/issues

For more information about these options, see the Getting Help page.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the AGPLv3 unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE for details.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. Please read How To Contribute for details.

This project is currently accepting all types of contributions, bug fixes, security fixes, maintenance work, or new features. However, please make sure to have a discussion about your new feature idea with the maintainers prior to beginning development to maximize the chances of your change being accepted. You can start a conversation by creating a new issue on this repo summarizing your idea.

The Open edX Code of Conduct

All community members are expected to follow the Open edX Code of Conduct.

People

The assigned maintainers for this component and other project details may be found in Backstage. Backstage pulls this data from the catalog-info.yaml file in this repo.

Reporting Security Issues

Please do not report security issues in public, and email security@openedx.org instead.