Best practices in modern web projects

http://blog.arvidandersson.se/2014/06/17/best-practices-in-modern-web-projects

by arvida • 12 years ago

153 85 12 years ago

blog.arvidandersson.se

ericcholis• 12 years ago

All of this really covers the primary thing I preach when working with new devs. "You shouldn't be the only one who knows how to set this up and run it."

One thing that might be missing is good code documentation. Using DocBlock for PHP, for example. Ideally this is maintained in code, but that can get bloaty. At the very least, a git repo of markdown files. Even the built-in github wikis would suffice.

parham2• 12 years ago

These aren't really best practices, they're too abstract. Best practices would be exactly how you do said practices the best way possible.

A more appropriate title could be "list of must read articles for modern web development".

csbrooks• 12 years ago

I'm not sure about that; I feel like I got a lot from the article without following the links.

parham2• 12 years ago

This didn't cover anything useful it just said what everyone was already aware of, the only useful part was the links. Everything else was like saying to spread butter on toast use a butter knife.

collyw3• 12 years ago

"Git

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

Its a pain in the arse to learn, overcomplicated for 90% of the cases it is used in. How many people actually need a distributed version control."

(I use Git. It is powerful and useful, but the justification for using it in the article isn't really great. No mention of Mercurial or other version control systems).

Expez• 12 years ago

The benefit of standardizing on a tool that is "good enough" is worth it imo. Learning git is easier than learning svn, darcs, hg, perforce and git and juggling between them when you want to submit patches to open source projects or get new clients.

couchand2• 12 years ago

Don't forget bzr!

collyw3• 12 years ago

I am not going to argue with you on that point, because that is the reason I am using GIT. CVS would be far more suited to my personal use cases.

couchand2• 12 years ago

The world's inconsistent internet connections are a great reason to require distributed version control. I'm often trying to work from a location without a reliable connection to the internet, be it a plane, train or bus, a coffee shop with spotty internet or a meetup. Requiring a connection to a server kills productivity in those situations.

Perhaps there is something to be said for Mercurial, but unless you were previously on Subversion it's certainly not that it's easy to learn.

collyw3• 12 years ago

Yes, but I would guess that non distributed would suit 90% of use cases. I imagine most software is still developed in one physical location.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

It's easier to find other people who know git that who know mercurial.

jammycakes• 12 years ago

The fact of the matter is that love it or hate it, Git is now the most widely used VCS on the market in corporate settings (see e.g. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/). More importantly though, it is also the de facto standard for version control -- the lingua franca of source code management, communication and collaboration. Subversion and TFS still have significant market share, but everything else has pretty much fallen off a cliff in the past couple of years.

Also, many of Git's most powerful features have nothing to do with being distributed. Easy branching and merging, private versioning, bisect, rewritable changesets, stash, and the ability to cherry-pick individual changes within a file to commit, back out or stash could all theoretically be built into a centralised system.

AlexMuir• 12 years ago

No idea how this is getting so many points. There's absolutely nothing of any practical interest here. Use version control and documentation... End of post. I'd say these are more industry standard practices than leading edge.

ricardolopes• 12 years ago

I have to agree. Interesting topic, but not a lot of new content there.

romanovcode• 12 years ago

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

Not to mention those points were mainly subjective. Don't get me wrong, I like and use Git myself but statements like "Use this, most people use it so you must use it too!" are just horrible.

Isamu• 12 years ago

No idea how this is getting so many points.

Because the basics have to be pointed out again ... and again.

I think the upvotes don't primarily mean "omg I never thought to do this" but rather "will someone please staple this to the foreheads of all the clueless devs I've had to clean up after."

opendais• 12 years ago

I upvoted it on the odd hope that one of my coworkers sees it and actually considers following some of it. ;)

btrombley• 12 years ago

It's best practices, not new practices, and a very clear concise write up at that. I wish if read this 6 months ago, rather than learning it the hard way.

pietro• 12 years ago

I'd say these are more industry standard practices than leading edge.

Yeah, that's sort of what "best practices" are all about. They are for teaching outsiders what insiders have learned through practice. The intended audience is everyone who doesn't already know this.

If you consider the article of no practical interest for a seasoned insider, that's about the highest praise you can give.

euphemize• 12 years ago

True, although you'd be surprised to see how many people fail to provide proper docs, or use git for source control, still in 2014. I agree with others in here, maybe the title is just misleading more than anything else.

gnaritas5• 12 years ago

Failing to use git as your source control mechanism is not an actual problem; failing to use any source control is a problem, you don't have to use git.

joshdotsmith• 12 years ago

There will always be a new freshman class. Every year, someone joins HN (or the community at large) knowing next to nothing. We should welcome those people, not make them feel bad for being new.

noblethrasher• 12 years ago

Yep. HN wants to avoid eternal Septembers; occasional Septembers are fine though.

Demiurge3• 12 years ago

Serve these through a CDN that is optimised for serving static files to ensure high transfer speeds and therefore increased user happiness.

I was not aware this was that common or even considered always the best practice. Is this really the best practice for any website? How exactly is a CDN more optimized than nginx on a dedicated server with 1GB connection?

regularjack• 12 years ago

One of the reasons is that CDNs are geographically distributed so the files will be served from a datacenter closer to the client.

vukers• 12 years ago

At a minimum, a CDN automatically caches and serves content from multiple servers globally.

Demiurge3• 12 years ago

Is it worth it if you have a US specific website that doesn't get that many users (~3 sessions at once)?

Also, another website I administer has a lot of user uploaded content that's constantly changing. I've not dealt with a CDN before, so I don't know how CDN helps with that? I think only a fraction of the data is static in this case.

PS Why the hell would someone downmod my honest question?

GrinningFool• 12 years ago

The very nature of the kind of content you're serving over a CDN seems to indicate that unless you're extremely high traffic, the benefits are few: most of your clients are going to grab the static content from you once at a cost of a few hundred extra ms, and then rarely need it again.

I think having CDN as a basic requirement for all projects is... ill-considered. Remember, using a CDN is giving away data about your users' browsing practices without their consent.

ape4• 12 years ago

Is there an entry level CDN. Enter your credit card and get access, upload files and go. For a few bucks a month.

numbsafari2• 12 years ago

Look at CloudFront from AWS. CloudFiles from Rackspace used to also include built-in (no additional charge) distribution over Akamai as well, though it had limitations on the number of purges you could do, I think.

jordo37• 12 years ago

Fastly can easily be setup on top of s3 and we have been super happy with their basic layout and then their advanced features as we needed more (ssl content delivery, selective purging, etc)

rpedela• 12 years ago

I personally don't find much use for a CDN when dealing with a typical website's CSS, JS, images until you have very large traffic. You can concat and minify your CSS and JS files, and add a cache control header to all static content. That should be good enough until you get very large traffic.

But like anything, it depends on the use case. If the product is primarily a file server like Dropbox then maybe using a CDN early makes sense. Or your smallish number of users are spread across the world might be another use case.

Nexialist• 12 years ago

The "12 Factor App" manifesto http://12factor.net/ is in the same vein as this, perhaps a bit more in-depth.

I like the idea of these guides generally. I think it'd be more valuable if they linked to example production code that followed the principles however, since there's no substitute for the real thing.

Come to think of it, I've never seen anybody write up any kind of index of (for example) Github projects that exemplify good design patterns for people to look at. Or some kind of recommended code reference list.

pmichaud• 12 years ago

I like that idea too, but I suspect that there are pretty much zero non-trivial projects that actually follow best practices like these consistently. Maybe I'm wrong.

IgorPartola6• 12 years ago

Ugh. Pull requests again? OK, look, unless your team is so large that you can't effectively communicate otherwise, pull requests are just friction. Use feature branches, then merge them when they are ready. Trying to pretend like your two person team is a huge open source project with many distributed part-time and full-time developers is cargo cult at its worst.

eropple7• 12 years ago

While I'm often lazy about this, I think that there are advantages to doing this with this once your team is over just a solo developer. Encouraging your fellow developers to read (and at least understand, if not internalize) your code has some bus-proofing to it, and I don't think it's that much friction if done well.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

And helps make sure people are familiar with more of the code.

awj2• 12 years ago

Meh, it doesn't have to be friction. If the goal is to ensure your other team member sees the changes you're making before they're merged in a pull request both accomplishes that and gives you both a place to put some notes related to that process.

I think you're ascribing too much ceremony to this. It's useful to have something written down for any discussion about these changes, and a pull request is as good of a place as any for that. Plus it ensures everything is all set up to merge once you're both satisfied with the changes.

hoggle• 12 years ago

We are a trusting team and don't do pull requests with our closed source repos either.

To avert chaos it's much better to have an orderly branching model in place e.g. feature branches! My fellow partners made us go all "git flow" last year and the result has been a really tidy and satisfying workflow:

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Atlassian's SourceTree also helps us with maintaining "the flow":

http://www.sourcetreeapp.com

https://www.atlassian.com/git/workflows

Git extensions and screencast on how to setup on OSX:

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow

http://build-podcast.com/git-flow/

xtracto• 12 years ago

We have been using Git Flow in our team too. One advantage I se is that using git-flow specific hooks we add some metadata to every time a feature/ branch is finished. This metadata goes into an automatic Release notes file which is automatically added to the repo (as an amend of the flow's last commit).

Similarly, hotfixes have metadata which goes to their own hotfix.csv file.

A deploy script processes the hotfixes and feature files to create a Release notes.

We've got a very smooth release documentation process which is difficult for Dev's to hate and skip.

buffportion6• 12 years ago

Or don't use branches at all. Develop on trunk/master with continuous integration. It reduces work-in-progress, exposes conflicts sooner and has a host of other knock-on benefits.

chrisweekly• 12 years ago

To 'CI' [per se] I say "yes, of course." It's a best practice. But it is not a substitute for branching! I want to choose when I'm exposed to conflicts. "Sooner" is usually -- but not always -- "better". Summary: strong disagreement on this radical approach.

angersock• 12 years ago

This is a masterful troll, right?

...please?

auxbuss• 12 years ago

This is my preferred method too. But a lot of developers struggle with the discipline of small, discrete, incremental changes, plus the dependence on solid testing skills. It also requires a culture that can support it. No blame, in particular.

However, if you have a team that is comfortable working this way -- and is only occasionally breaking things; it happens -- then it is a wonderfully creative, frictionless, and flexible way to develop.

chris_mahan• 12 years ago

That's what we do.

Works well.

Break the build, all stops, and we huddle and fix it.

Sort of like the andon cord in toyota factories.

jaegerpicker2• 12 years ago

I couldn't disagree with this more. Pull requests provide a quick and relatively pain less code review tool. Unless you are suggesting that code review is a bad practice, which in that case I'm pretty well dumb founded as I think it's a requirement for intelligent modern development.

IgorPartola6• 12 years ago

They are a great tool for when you don't have any other way to communicate with the other developers. Code reviews are a great practice, and we all should do more of them. I do it when I get an email like "hey, could you review my code in feature-branch-xyz before I merge it?" It's less friction than doing GitHub-proprietary pull requests, and involves much less pompousness.

st3fan• 12 years ago

I am sad that this article does not contain the word 'Security'.

kylequest2• 12 years ago

I wouldn't call the part about configurations (in the post and in the 12 factor app reference) a best practice. Using environment variables is a hack that has negative side effects including security side effects.

This statement is just silly: "A good goal is that the application can be open sourced at any time without compromising any credentials." It's silly because the use of environment variables doesn't prevent anybody from putting them in a shell script that gets committed to git...

njharman• 12 years ago

You're reversing the "goal" and "practice". It's not that Environment Vars allow you to "open source / credentials".

It's (goal) "be able to open source any time without compromising any credentials". One method (practice), use Environment Vars. Evars being a poor choice in your and somewhat my opinion, does not translate into the goal being poor. It's a laudable goal.

kylequest2• 12 years ago

Being able to open source code without compromising any credentials is a great goal, but using environment variables doesn't really accomplish it UNLESS your code only runs on a PaaS, which will always supply all of your app's env vars, but it's unrealistic for a number of reasons.

First, there'll be extra vars that your PaaS won't fully manage, so you'll have to keep track of them yourself and then later configure the PaaS environment, so your app can access them. Second, for non-PaaS applications/deployments you still need to manage the environment variables.

The variables don't magically appear by themselves :-) They need to be stored somewhere... This "somewhere" is likely to be the git repo (for the app), so you are back to square one on this.

curun1r• 12 years ago

I think they made a mistake by making the "gets configuration parameters from the environment" specific to a UNIX/system environment. You can accomplish the same effect in a much more elegant manner using a tool like etcd or consul.

But the important part is really that the deployable unit pulls its configuration from the environment where it's deployed. There are a ton of ways to accomplish this...environment variables are one way, etcd/consul is another, you can use something language-specific like JNDI or you can even use a file with configs in a well-known location, but you really need to be deploying the same artifact to QA, E2E testing, production and whatever other environments you might have.

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

I disagree with "Keep the master branch deployable at all times." Both my CSS framework Min (http://minfwk.com) and several other popular GitHub projects use the strategy of 'only use one branch, and use tags to mark stable versions'.

Min's only branch (gh-pages, so we can serve the site with GitHub) is usually "unstable" (in the sense that a CSS framework can be unstable.) If someone wants a stable release, that's what Git's tag system is for.

awj2• 12 years ago

I think the idea is sound, but the reasoning isn't. Keeping master deployable at all times forces breaking changes off into feature branches so unrelated pieces of functionality can't interfere with each other's release schedules.

Keeping master deployable for bug fixes doesn't make sense to me, though. Are you going to deploy new features sitting in master because something else had a bug? Just go look up the last release tag, make your bug fixes there, then merge them into master.

I've been bitten too many times by unstable features holding up releases on master (both my features and other team member's). Feature branches do a wonderful job of solving this and the required merge back into master gives you a nudge to prevent scope creep.

Arkadir• 12 years ago

Honest question: what are the benefits of using environment variables over having an actual configuration file (that is obviously not added to version control) ?

blogimus• 12 years ago

Ability to run on Heroku

didip• 12 years ago

Heroku & Docker.

But most importantly, it lends to dynamic configuration when using etcd or zookeeper.

IgorPartola6• 12 years ago

Unless your environment demands it, it doesn't matter. In fact, it can be a bit of a pain in the ass to implement on your own, if you are not using Heroku or some such. The main point there is to not put secrets into your git repo. How you accomplish that for the most part doesn't matter.

Best practices in modern web projects

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