Remix Synth Stack

Learn more about Remix Stacks.

npx create-remix --template remix-run/synth-stack

What's in the stack

• Multi-region Fly app deployment with Docker
• Multi-region Fly PostgreSQL Cluster
• Healthcheck endpoint for Fly backups region fallbacks
• Production Monitoring with Prometheus Metrics and Grafana
• GitHub Actions for deploy on merge to production and staging environments
• Email/Password Authentication with cookie-based sessions
• Database ORM with Prisma
• Styling with Tailwind
• End-to-end testing with Cypress
• Local third party request mocking with MSW
• Unit testing with Vitest and Testing Library
• Code formatting with Prettier
• Linting with ESLint
• Static Types with TypeScript

Not a fan of bits of the stack? Fork it, change it, and use npx create-remix --template your/repo! Make it your own.

Development

• Start the Postgres Database in Docker:

  npm run docker

  Note: The npm script will complete while Docker sets up the container in the background. Ensure that Docker has finished and your container is running before proceeding.

• Initial setup:

  npm run setup

• Run the first build:

  npm run build

• Start dev server:

  npm run dev

This starts your app in development mode, rebuilding assets on file changes.

The database seed script creates a new user with some data you can use to get started:

• Email: [email protected]
• Password: racheliscool

If you'd prefer not to use Docker, you can also use Fly's Wireguard VPN to connect to a development database (or even your production database). You can find the instructions to set up Wireguard here, and the instructions for creating a development database here.

Relevant code:

This is a pretty simple note-taking app, but it's a good example of how you can build a full stack app with Prisma and Remix. The main functionality is creating users, logging in and out, and creating and deleting notes.

• creating users, and logging in and out ./app/models/user.server.ts
• user sessions, and verifying them ./app/session.server.ts
• creating, and deleting notes ./app/models/note.server.ts

Deployment

This Remix Stack comes with two GitHub Actions that handle automatically deploying your app to production and staging environments.

Prior to your first deployment, you'll need to do a few things:

• Install Fly

• Sign up and log in to Fly

  fly auth signup

  Note: If you have more than one Fly account, ensure that you are signed into the same account in the Fly CLI as you are in the browser. In your terminal, run fly auth whoami and ensure the email matches the Fly account signed into the browser.

• Create two apps on Fly, one for staging, one for production, and one for Grafana:

  fly create synth-stack-template
  fly create synth-stack-template-staging
  fly create synth-stack-template-grafana

• Initialize Git.

  git init

• Create a new GitHub Repository, and then add it as the remote for your project. Do not push your app yet!

  git remote add origin <ORIGIN_URL>

• Add a FLY_API_TOKEN to your GitHub repo. To do this, go to your user settings on Fly and create a new token, then add it to your repo secrets with the name FLY_API_TOKEN.

• Add a SESSION_SECRET to your fly app secrets, to do this you can run the following commands:

  fly secrets set SESSION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) --app synth-stack-template
  fly secrets set SESSION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) --app synth-stack-template-staging

  Note: When creating the staging secret, you may get a warning from the Fly CLI that looks like this:

  WARN app flag 'synth-stack-template-staging' does not match app name in config file 'synth-stack-template'
  

  This simply means that the current directory contains a config that references the production app we created in the first step. Ignore this warning and proceed to create the secret.

  If you don't have openssl installed, you can also use 1password to generate a random secret, just replace $(openssl rand -hex 32) with the generated secret.

• Create a persistent volume for both your Grafana instance. Run the following:

  fly volumes create grafana_storage --region dfw --size 10 --config ./ops/grafana/fly.toml

• Deploy the Grafana instance, since this is not part of the Github Action pipeline. Run the following:

  fly deploy ./ops/grafana

• Create a database for both your staging and production environments. Run the following:

  fly postgres create --name synth-stack-template-db
  fly postgres attach --postgres-app synth-stack-template-db --app synth-stack-template
  
  fly postgres create --name synth-stack-template-staging-db
  fly postgres attach --postgres-app synth-stack-template-staging-db --app synth-stack-template-staging

  Note: You'll get the same warning for the same reason when attaching the staging database that you did in the fly set secret step above. No worries. Proceed!

Fly will take care of setting the DATABASE_URL secret for you.

Now that every is set up you can commit and push your changes to your repo. Every commit to your main branch will trigger a deployment to your production environment, and every commit to your dev branch will trigger a deployment to your staging environment.

If you run into any issues deploying to Fly, make sure you've followed all of the steps above and if you have, then post as many details about your deployment (including your app name) to the Fly support community. They're normally pretty responsive over there and hopefully can help resolve any of your deployment issues and questions.

Multi-region deploys

Once you have your site and database running in a single region, you can add more regions by following Fly's Scaling and Multi-region PostgreSQL docs.

Make certain to set a PRIMARY_REGION environment variable for your app. You can use [env] config in the fly.toml to set that to the region you want to use as the primary region for both your app and database.

Testing your app in other regions

Install the ModHeader browser extension (or something similar) and use it to load your app with the header fly-prefer-region set to the region name you would like to test.

You can check the x-fly-region header on the response to know which region your request was handled by.

GitHub Actions

We use GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment. Anything that gets into the main branch will be deployed to production after running tests/build/etc. Anything in the dev branch will be deployed to staging.

Testing

Cypress

We use Cypress for our End-to-End tests in this project. You'll find those in the cypress directory. As you make changes, add to an existing file or create a new file in the cypress/e2e directory to test your changes.

We use @testing-library/cypress for selecting elements on the page semantically.

To run these tests in development, run npm run test:e2e:dev which will start the dev server for the app as well as the Cypress client. Make sure the database is running in docker as described above.

We have a utility for testing authenticated features without having to go through the login flow:

cy.login();
// you are now logged in as a new user

We also have a utility to auto-delete the user at the end of your test. Just make sure to add this in each test file:

afterEach(() => {
  cy.cleanupUser();
});

That way, we can keep your local db clean and keep your tests isolated from one another.

Vitest

For lower level tests of utilities and individual components, we use vitest. We have DOM-specific assertion helpers via @testing-library/jest-dom.

Type Checking

This project uses TypeScript. It's recommended to get TypeScript set up for your editor to get a really great in-editor experience with type checking and auto-complete. To run type checking across the whole project, run npm run typecheck.

Linting

This project uses ESLint for linting. That is configured in .eslintrc.js.

Formatting

We use Prettier for auto-formatting in this project. It's recommended to install an editor plugin (like the VSCode Prettier plugin) to get auto-formatting on save. There's also a npm run format script you can run to format all files in the project.