Tooling

At Comic Relief, we have a long history of continuous integration and have been using tools such as Jenkins, Travis, Circle CI, Netlify and Concourse CI. Over the last couple of years, we have settled on the following tools:

API Documentation

We use the following tools to provide API documentation to both internal and external users of our services.

  • apiDoc used to document all of our Serverless NodeJS APIs.

Automated Testing

We use the following tooling to automatically and manually test code.

  • Artillery is used to fire requests at a service and ensure that it can handle customer load.

  • BackstopJS for ensuring that webpages do not visually regress.

  • Behat is used for end-to-end testing of legacy PHP applications.

  • BrowserStack is used by Nightwatch and Behat to test against a wide range of browsers and devices.

  • Cypress is used to run headless Chrome-based end-to-end tests on frontend repositories.

  • Jest is used to take snapshots of visual components and to run unit tests.

  • Lighthouse for ensuring that web pages meet accessibility, performance and SEO standards.

  • Nightwatch is used for end-to-end testing journeys.

  • Mocha is used to write unit, feature, integration and end-to-end tests.

  • Postman is used to locally test APIs and share those tests among developers.

Coding Standards

We use the following tools to ensure developers adhere to coding standards across projects.

  • ESLint for ensuring code quality across our team.

  • Prowler for ensuring compliance of architectural standards within AWS.

For more information, see the coding standards guide.

Content Management Systems

We use the following content management systems to provide an editor interface to edit consumer-facing content.

  • Contentful is our new content management system, which exposes a GraphQL endpoint and allows for more flexible content use across our front and backend applications.

Dependency Management

We use the following dependency management systems to pull in dependencies from third parties.

  • Composer is used in our legacy PHP projects to bring in dependencies.

  • Yarn is used in all of our NodeJS projects over NPM as we have generally found it to be faster.

Domain Management

We use the following tools and services to manage our domains,

  • AWS Route 53 provides the DNS for all of our domains and subdomains.

  • CSC is the registrar for all of our domains, and delegates the name servers to Route 53.

  • Pulumi is used to orchestrate the CloudFormation to create and manage our domains.

For more information, see the domain management guide here

Hosting

We use the following hosting providers to host our consumer facing services and applications.

  • AWS is used as the primary hosting service for all of our applications.

  • Platform.sh is used to host our legacy Drupal sites (comicrelief.com and sportrelief.com).

  • Pivotal Web Services is a container service used to host our legacy PHP applications.

For more information, see the hosting guide.

Monitoring

We use the following systems to monitor and alert us to issues within our applications and services.

  • AWS CloudWatch is used to store raw logs from our Serverless applications.

  • Epsagon is used to aggregate runtime and invocation information and errors from our Serverless backends and raise alerts to errors.

  • Sentry is used to record and alert to errors in both frontend and backend code.

  • Slack is used to alert developers to issues from all of our monitoring tools.

  • Statusfy is used to communicate issues and degradation of functionality to our stakeholders.

  • Wormly used to monitor uptime of public-facing endpoints and test SSL validity.

For more information, see the monitoring related guide.

Orchestration

We use the following products and services to orchestrate code deployment.

  • CircleCI for running tests on every pull request. These tests are great for testing things in isolation and are ideally suited for frontend tests or unit tests, although we’re using Cypress to do end-to-end testing against sandbox backend environments.

  • Concourse CI for all staging and production deployments, running various test suites and all sorts of utility or housekeeping tasks that are essential to keeping platforms running happily. We also use this for periodical tasks such as running Lighthouse, performance reviews, visual regression, or longer-running end-to-end tests we don’t wish to run on every deployment.

  • Travis CI is now our legacy way of running tests at a pull request stage and is nearly fully replaced by CircleCI.

For more information, see the pipeline guide.

Preview Environments

We try to provide preview environments for pull requests to allow easy review and testing of code changes.

  • AWS used to deploy branch previews of static web applications to AWS S3.

  • Gatsby Preview is used to provide a realtime preview of changes in Contentful in our Gatsby sites.

  • Netlify for deployment previews of our static front-end applications, mostly the different ReactJS codebases.

  • Platform.sh used for pull request previews of our Drupal sites.

Team Communication Tools

We use the following team communication tools to ensure a steady flow of communication within the development team.

  • Pull Panda to provide statistics and reminders around pull requests and comments around them.

  • Slack provides us with a platform to communicate within our team and also provides us with alerting to issues.

Third Party Dependency Testing

The following tools are used to test third-party dependencies within our codebases.

  • Dependabot A free tool provided by GitHub that provides third-party dependency testing. Does the same as Snyk, but catches a varying range of errors.

  • Roave Security Advisories is imported via Composer for all legacy PHP applications. It is a Composer package that prevents installation of packages with known security issues.

  • Snyk for automated testing of codebase dependencies, ensuring that packages are up to date and do not have any known security vulnerabilities.

Version Control Systems

We use the following version control systems to track changes to code and as storage for it,

  • Docker Hub is used to host docker images used for our CI/CD systems and legacy PHP applications.

  • GitHub is our primary VCS system and is used for the sharing of all public and private repositories.

  • NPM is used to share our common tooling across projects and with the wider programming community.

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