Origami Frontend Components & Services

Readme: origami-repo-data

Get information about Origami repositories. See the production service for API information.

Build status
MIT licensed

Table Of Contents


Running Origami Repo Data requires Node.js 8.x and npm. A PostgreSQL database is also required.

If you're working on a Mac, the simplest way to install PostgreSQL is to use Homebrew. Run the following and pay attention to the instructions output after installing:

brew install postgresql

Running Locally

Before we can run the application, we'll need to install dependencies:

npm install

Create a local PostgreSQL database, you may need to provide credentials for the following command depending on your local setup:

make db-create

Now you'll need to migrate the database, which sets up the required tables. You'll also need to run this command if you pull commits which include new database migrations:

make db-migrate-up

Run the application in development mode with:

make run-dev

Now you can access the app over HTTP on port 8080: http://localhost:8080/


We configure Origami Repo Data using environment variables. In development, configurations are set in a .env file. In production, these are set through Heroku config. Further documentation on the available options can be found in the Origami Service documentation.

One time only

Required everywhere

Required in Heroku

Required locally


The service can also be configured by sending HTTP headers, these would normally be set in your CDN config:


Most of the files which are used in maintaining your local database are in the data folder of this repo. This is split into migrations and seed data.

You can use the following commands to manage your local database:

make db-migrate-up    # migrate up to the latest version of the schema
make db-migrate-down  # revert the last applied migration
make db-seed          # add seed data to the database for local testing

To create a new migration file, you'll need to run:

./script/create-migration.js <NAME-OF-MIGRATION>

This will generate a file in data/migration which you can update to include up and down migrations. We use Knex for migrations, copying from an existing file may help.

Seed data for local development is in data/seed/demo. Every file in this directory will be used to seed the database when make db-seed is run.

Operational Documentation

The source documentation for the runbook and healthcheck endpoints (EU/US) are stored in the operational-documentation folder. These files are pushed to CMDB upon every promotion to production. You can push them to CMDB manually by running the following command:

make cmdb-update


The tests are split into unit tests and integration tests. To run tests on your machine you'll need to install Node.js and run make install. Then you can run the following commands:

make test              # run all the tests
make test-unit         # run the unit tests
make test-integration  # run the integration tests

You can run the unit tests with coverage reporting, which expects 90% coverage or more:

make test-unit-coverage verify-coverage

The code will also need to pass linting on CI, you can run the linter locally with:

make verify

To run the integration tests, you'll need a local PostgreSQL database named origami-repo-data-test. You can set this up with:

make db-create-test

We run the tests and linter on CI, you can view results on CircleCI. make test and make lint must pass before we merge a pull request.


The production (EU/US) and QA applications run on Heroku. We deploy continuously to QA via CircleCI, you should never need to deploy to QA manually. We use a Heroku pipeline to promote QA deployments to production.

You can promote either through the Heroku interface, or by running the following command locally:

make promote



We've outlined some common issues that can occur in the running of the Origami Repo Data:

What do I do if memory usage is high?

For now, restart the Heroku dynos:

heroku restart --app origami-repo-data-eu
heroku restart --app origami-repo-data-us

If this doesn't help, then a temporary measure could be to add more dynos to the production applications, or switch the existing ones to higher performance dynos.

What if I need to deploy manually?

If you really need to deploy manually, you should only do so to QA (production deploys should always be a promotion). Use the following command to deploy to QA manually:

make deploy


The Financial Times has published this software under the MIT license.

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Help & Support

Check the origami-repo-data documentation if you haven't already. It's maintained directly by the Origami team so if you have any questions we are happy to help. 😊

Slack: #ft-origami
Email: origami.support@ft.com