Frontend

The SciCat frontend is the SciCat metadata catalogue web UI, built on top of the Angular framework.

Configuration options

The frontend configuration is set by the config files . Files inside the config folder, with a .json extension are merged respecting the alphabetical order of the files in the container , with config.v3.json applied depending on the BE_VERSION .

Please note that merging the config files is a functionality provided by SciCat Live and is not supported natively by the frontend .

For an extensive list of available options see here in the SciCat frontend section.

Default configuration

In the default configuration config , the frontend is set to call the backend service available at backend.localhost (either v4 , by default, or v3 if specified otherwise by setting BE_VERSION ).

For an explanation of how setting BE_VERSION changes the environment creation see here .

Enable additional features

Since there was a small breaking change from v3 to v4 , when connecting to the backend , the BE_VERSION value controls if config.v3.json file , which is applied when BE_VERSION=v3 , should be included in the configs merge process.

With DEV=true , please use npm start -- --host 0.0.0.0 . This is to allow traffic from any IP to the frontend component and it is necessary since the component runs in the docker network.

Setting the BACKEND_HTTPS_URL env variable requires changing the backend URL used by the frontend . This is managed here .

When setting FRONTENT_HTTPS_URL it is likely you also want to set the BACKEND_HTTPS_URL , to allow the communication between the two wherever the browser is accessed.