At Oktavilla we regularly start new projects. Over the years we have therefore come up with a few best practices to ensure that it is easy to take part in our projects and reduce errors. We use these in the majority of our projects, both internally and for clients. In the end we deliver high quality web projects and this is one part of that process.

In this blog post I focus on a few practices related to the technical side of things. Like setup and what to think about when choosing tools and processes for a project. Each practice has a link or two in the end to resources with more information.

The README file

Let’s start out with the most important file in any project.

A project must have a README file in its root directory. It contains information on the project and how get started with it. A new team member should easily get a understanding of what this project is and how to get started working with it from reading this file.

When writing the README think of the reader as a novice with basic knowledge of programming environments. Format the text with Markdown to make it easy for the reader to digest. Markdown is both easily read as source code and can be rendered as HTML (GitHub does this automatically for example).

A README should include at least the following sections:

Introduction

A brief explanation of the projects purpose. Also include the projects role if it is a part of larger architecture, who the client might be and any other information that might be good to know at a introductory level.

Dependencies

Include a list of dependencies that need to be installed separately. For example: database servers, package managers and programming languages. Be sure to include what versions are required as well.

Local Development Setup

Someone who is new to the project should easily understand how get to it up and running for local development using the README. Let the reader know what steps to take with a fresh copy of the project’s code. This can be notes on how to install needed packages, start the application and run the tests.

Use concrete examples like what to type into the shell to invoke the different tasks.

Configuration

If the application can be configured using environment variables include a list of these. Explain what each environment variable is used for.

Deploy

Part of working on a project is also being able to deploy your changes. Let the reader know how to deploy code to production and staging environments.

For example, if you use Heroku, include examples on how to set up the different Git remotes used for deployment and how to push code to these.

Version Control and Git

First of all, use version control. Second, use Git for version control. It is modern, works great and a majority of developers are either comfortable using it or want to start using it.

Deployable at All Times

Keep the master branch deployable at all times. Sooner or later you will get a bug reported on the code running in production that needs to be fixed right away. Keeping your current work in a separate branch allow you to quickly switch to the master branch and fix the bug. It also gives you the peace of mind to deploy without worrying about accidentally pushing any new and untested code to your users.

Commit Messages

Write informative commit messages. A good commit message includes a short title and a body. The title explains the purpose of the change and the body gives more information on why this change was needed. Think of commit messages as documentation of the code

If there is any extra information that might be useful for someone looking at the commit, include that in the body. For example, if there is a corresponding issue in your issue tracker be sure to include a reference to it.

Pull Requests

Use a web based Git hosting alternative like GitHub or BitBucket that supports pull requests for branches. This let you tell other team members about code changes before they are merged into the master branch.

Use this for discussion and to spread knowledge about different parts of the code base by code reviews. Code reviews can be both high level or very thorough. The important thing is that someone else other than the author takes a look at the changes and says “thumbs up” before the code is merged into the master.

Be open to discussion, but don’t let the review process hold back a merge to long. It is every team member’s responsibility to be keep the process quick and smooth within reasonable limits.

It is also a good idea to keep an extra friendly tone in the discussions to avoid misunderstandings and grief. Use emojis to keep the discussion fun and productive.

Configuration

Most applications have some kind of configuration. It can be a connection URL for a database, API credentials for external services or something else.

Unix-like operation systems have a great method for providing applications with configuration values at run time. It is called environment variables. Use this and store all application configuration as environment variables.

Using environment variables allows for a separation of configuration from the code base. This makes it easy to change configuration values for a deployed application without updating any code.

A good goal is that the application can be open sourced at any time without compromising any credentials.

Package Managers

All projects have some kind of external dependencies on libraries and most programming languages have at least one package manager to handle installation of these. For example ruby has bundler and node.js has npm. Use a package manager and be sure to include the file that specifies package versions in the project.

Go through the list of dependencies once in a while and check which packages have been updated and if the update might be of interest. For example, you can do this easily with bundler using the command bundle outdated or with npm using npm outdated .

A majority of “good” packages use semantic versioning which helps you understand what to expect from a new version of a package. It tells you if a version is backwards compatible, adds new features or just fixes bugs.

Deploy

The deploy procedure should be automated so it requires a minimum of human interaction. With the information from the README and correct credentials it should be a matter of running a command in the shell or pressing a button to put a new version of the application online.

Automation is important to avoid human errors. If there are any manual tasks involved with making a deploy, sooner or later someone will forget to do them or do them incorrectly. There can be bugs in deploy scripts but once they are discovered and fixed they will not happen again.

Application Environments

An application should be capable of behaving differently depending of what environment it is running in.

Examples of different behaviours that depend on the current environment might be how much detail is displayed on error pages, what goes into log files, javascript minification or if the application should send e-mails. Using environments you get a common way to handle these special cases.

The default environments are development , test , staging and production . Development is the default mode that the application runs in when you run it locally. Test is the environment your tests run in. Staging and production are environments that the application runs in when deployed. The production environment is where the actual end users use the application and staging is a replica of production that is used to test changes before they are pushed to production.

The application picks up what environment to run in from an environment variable. These are usually called something like NODE_ENV or RAILS_ENV .

Static Files Through a CDN

Static files like images, fonts, CSS and Javascripts for production applications should not be served from the same server as the application to end users. Serve these through a content delivery network, CDN. They are built and optimised for serving static files to users all over the globe fast. A faster experience makes for happier users.

Getting your files on the CDN should be part of your automated deployment procedure. A common way to solve this is using a CDN with a custom origin set up and cache busting by file name. With this the application will add the CDN-host and a hash of the files contents to all files that should be served through the CDN when run in the production environment.

For example, a stylesheet link tag will look like this in the development environment:

<link href= "/style.css" rel= "stylesheet" type= "text/css" >

And like this in production:

<link href= "http://my-cdn.com/style-a06ae46033959f7563b20c5faff6f5e60175253f.css" rel= "stylesheet" type= "text/css" >

When the CDN gets a request for a file it is missing it will request and cache that file from the application. As the hash is unique to the file contents the CDN will always fetch the correct version as long as the app outputs correct links in the markup. This also requires the app to handle fetching of static files with a hash appended to the filename. This can be solved by either a simple route rewrite or a precompilation task run at deploy.

And, remember that Amazon S3 is not a CDN and should not be used as such. This is a common mistake. It is a service for storing files and is not optimised for delivery. CloudFront is the Amazon CDN offering.

Closing Thoughts

All projects are different and of course the practices mentioned in this post are not valid for all projects. However, keeping a set of common practices for how to create, maintain and contribute to projects within an organisation makes things work smoother. It reduces setup time and makes it easy for new project members to start contributing. Just make sure that the documentation for your practices is alive and evolves over time.

Care about things like this? We are currently looking for Javascript and Ruby developers with a keen eye for details to join our team at Oktavilla. Get in touch if you want to know more.

Many thanks to my colleagues Gustaf Forsslund and Alexis Fellenius for proofreading this blog post.