Kaws

Named after the artist, kaws is a backend service that powers artsy.net collection pages. What are collections you ask? A Collection is a prefiltered version of Artsy's Collect page for marketing purposes.

Meta

• State: Production
• Production: http://kaws.artsy.net | k8s
• Staging: http://kaws-staging.artsy.net | k8s
• GitHub: https://github.com/artsy/kaws/
• CI: CircleCI; merged PRs to artsy/kaws#master are automatically deployed to staging. PRs from staging to release are automatically deployed to production. Start a deploy...
• Point People: @mbilokonsky, @xtina-starr

Prerequisites

• node.js 8.12.0 or newer
• yarn 1.10.1 or newer
• MongoDB 4.x

Note on Google API Access

KAWS exposes an /upload endpoint meant to be invoked from a google sheet. In order for this process to work a few environment values must be supplied:

1. GOOGLE_API_KEY
2. GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID
3. GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET
4. SPREADSHEET_IDS_ALLOWLIST

See the hokusai and/or the Kaws Credentials secure note in 1passsword for current values of these.

If it becomes necessary to re-generate these credentials in staging and production — as has happened a couple of times in the past — you can follow these instructions.

For local development, you can run yarn test-google-config to see if your local .env file's values for GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID, GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET and SPREADSHEET_IDS_ALLOWLIST validate.

Getting started

First, make sure to install dependencies:

yarn

We use the .env file to load environment-specific variables. Copy .env.example to .env so dotenv will automatically load them upon app boot:

cp .env.example .env

Usually you do not have to change them, but if you need, update the variables to match your local development setup.

Once this is done, the next step would be to load test data. The collection data is maintained by Artsy's marketing team in Google Drive as a spreadsheet (you need an @artsymail.com account). Download it as a CSV file (in this case saved as collections.csv) and try running the command below to load the data to your local MongoDB instance:

yarn update-database ./collections.csv

Finally, start the server by running the command below:

yarn dev
# or
hokusai dev start

Then open http://localhost:4000/playground and you should see Apollo's GraphQL Playground. Try running the GraphQL query below, and if you see real collections data coming back from the database you are good to go!

query {
  collections {
    id
    slug
    title
  }
}

Testing

yarn jest
# or
hokusai test

Did you change the GraphQL schema?

Metaphysics is the current consumer of Kaws GraphQL schema, and keeps a copy of its latest schema in https://github.com/artsy/metaphysics/tree/master/src/data. If you have made changes to the Kaws GraphQL schema, make sure you also update the copy of this schema in Metaphysics. In order to do so follow these steps:

1. In kaws run

yarn dump-schema

2. copy the _schema.graphql file generated ☝🏼 to kaws.graphql

cp _schema.graphql kaws.graphql

3. move the file above to your local Metaphysics under src/data and make a PR to Metaphysics with this change.

Updating the sitemap for Collect

When we update the production database with the update-database command, we also need to inform Google of the updates so newly added collections will be crawled. This could be done with the update-sitemap command. This comamnd needs to be run in the k8s container as it neeeds to point to the production databse:

hokusai production run 'yarn update-sitemap'

About Artsy

This project is the work of engineers at Artsy, the world's leading and largest online art marketplace and platform for discovering art. One of our core Engineering Principles is being Open Source by Default which means we strive to share as many details of our work as possible.

You can learn more about this work from our blog and by following @ArtsyOpenSource or explore our public data by checking out our API. If you're interested in a career at Artsy, read through our job postings!