Implementation best practices

Note

WIP!

To keep the codebase consistent whilst adding new code, please try to stick to the following best practices that have served us well so far (grouped by topic). For example, these best practices make sure it is clear which services touch the filesystem state of Orchest.

API design guidelines

New API endpoints should not end with trailing slashes. For example, go with /api/jobs and not with /api/jobs/.

React

Don’t use class components do use functional components.

Flask

Only write to the flask.config object on app initialization (Flask’s application factory). Changes to certain values inside the config object require a restart of the flask application for them to take effect, therefore the actual state can get out of sync with the state inside the config object when writing to it.

userdir

The orchest-api is not allowed to read content from the userdir. It essentially just passes pointers to the celery-worker which then does operations on the userdir.