This adds:
* a script for building and deploying the Ember UI and Storybook to
Vercel
* configuration for that deployment
* a header link to the UI to link to Storybook when built with
STORYBOOK_LINK=true
It also removes a file used to configure Netlify redirects.
The Netlify setup had two “sites”: nomad-storybook and nomad-ui. I
attempted to replicate that here but ran into some platform limitations
with Vercel: two “projects” cannot share the same root directory without
also sharing the same vercel.json that lets us specify configuration
such as the rewrite needed to handle deep linking into the Ember UI. I
tried having Storybook use /ui/storybook as the root directory (and
adding a symbolically-linked package.json to bypass Vercel’s refusal
to build without it) but that produced broken Storybook deployments.
This instead combines the two projects into one
(nomad-storybook-and-ui), defaults to forwarding / to /ui/, and
adds the header link to the UI to navigate to Storybook.
Rather than have a complex build script in the Vercel configuration UI,
this delegates to a script in the repository.
The presence of Storybook’s preview-head.html file in the repository
is a constant annoyance: it’s only needed for Storybook and it changes
all the time, producing a lot of Git noise. By making it a separate
step to have the Ember CLI server running before starting Storybook,
we no longer need to have preview-head in the repository. It needed to
be present because there was a race condition where it was sometimes
not generated in time for the Storybook parallel startup.
I originally planned to add component documentation, but as this dragged on and I found that JSDoc-to-Markdown sometimes needed hand-tuning, I decided to skip it and focus on replicating what was already present in Freestyle. Adding documentation is a finite task that can be revisited in the future.
My goal was to migrate everything from Freestyle with as few changes as possible. Some adaptations that I found necessary:
• the DelayedArray and DelayedTruth utilities that delay component rendering until slightly after initial render because without them:
◦ charts were rendering with zero width
◦ the JSON viewer was rendering with empty content
• Storybook in Ember renders components in a routerless/controllerless context by default, so some component stories needed changes:
◦ table pagination/sorting stories access to query params, which necessitates some reaching into Ember internals to start routing and dynamically generate a Storybook route/controller to render components into
◦ some stories have a faux controller as part of their Storybook context that hosts setInterval-linked dynamic computed properties
• some jiggery-pokery with anchor tags
◦ inert href='#' had to become href='javascript:;
◦ links that are actually meant to navigate need target='_parent' so they don’t navigate inside the Storybook iframe
Maybe some of these could be addressed by fixes in ember-cli-storybook but I’m wary of digging around in there any more than I already have, as I’ve lost a lot of time to Storybook confusion and frustrations already 😞
The STORYBOOK=true environment variable tweaks some environment settings to get things working as expected in the Storybook context.
I chose to:
• use angle bracket invocation within stories rather than have to migrate them soon after having moved to Storybook
• keep Freestyle around for now for its palette and typeface components
This sets a default-but-query-configurable Faker seed in development,
via faker-seed. It also changes uses of Math.random to use Faker’s
randomness so auto-generated data remains stable in development.
Buck Doyle