Special Collections Prototype

NYU Libraries Special Collections Discovery Application recreated with Blacklight 8.x

Getting Started

To check out the project and stand up a local instance:

git clone git@github.com:NYULibraries/specialcollections-prototype.git
cd specialcollections-prototype
bundle install
bin/rake sc:server

Then visit http://localhost:3000

Loading Data in Dev

There is a growing number of fixture files in spec/fixtures/files, pulled from dlfa-188_v1-indexer-http-requests-xml.

While the dev server is running (sc:server above) you can load these fixtures by running:

bin/rake sc:load

Playwright End-to-End Tests

The Playwright service automatically runs bin/rake sc:load in a short-lived helper container before executing the browser tests. This seeds the development Solr core with the full fixture set and leaves the index populated for ad-hoc browsing afterward.

To launch the suite (and its prerequisite containers) in one step:

docker compose up playwright

Add --build if you need to rebuild the Docker images first. The command will:

• Start Solr and the Rails app
• Run solr-fixtures (which executes bin/rake sc:load against the Solr container)
• Execute the Playwright suite

Playwright test files share a Prettier + ESLint configuration scoped to the e2e workspace. Run the formatter:

yarn --cwd e2e format

Use yarn --cwd e2e lint to verify formatting and linting without modifying files.

To exercise the suite without Docker, start bin/rake sc:server in another terminal. With the app running locally, use the helper script to run the Playwright suite without reloading fixtures on every invocation:

bin/playwright-local

Important: create an .env.test file in the e2e directory with the following content so the helper points Playwright at your local app:

PLAYWRIGHT_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3000

Note: if your local Rails database has pending migrations you may see an ActiveRecord::PendingMigrationError when starting the app or running the tests. Apply migrations before running the server or Playwright with:

bin/rails db:migrate

Fixtures remain in Solr between runs. When you do need a fresh load, either set PLAYWRIGHT_LOAD_FIXTURES=1 bin/playwright-local or pass --load-fixtures as the first argument before any Playwright flags.

To run Playwright in headed mode, run from root:

yarn --cwd e2e test:e2e --headed

Test Suite

To run the test suite:

bin/rake sc:test

To autofix any Rubocop issues, run the following:

bundle exec rubocop -a

Running Against Another Solr

To stand up dev against an existing instance of Solr:

SOLR_URL=http://ip-address:port/solr/findingaids bin/rails server