Show HN: Helium – a headless, open-source LMS

📚 Developer Guide | 🗣 Discord | 📝 GraphQL Docs | 🎨 Storybook Docs

About

Helium is a frontend web development framework for building highly contextual, dynamic and personalized learning experiences. Helium provides you with a complete library of UI Components, Hooks, and Utilities that make building custom learning experiences fast, easy, and fun.

Helium utilizes a modern technology stack that includes React, GraphQL, and Tailwind CSS to provide an exceptional developer experience. The out-of-the-box UI components make getting started easy and with GraphQL getting to the data you need is intuitive and fast.

Getting Started

Requirements:

npm and node are pinned to specific versions using Volta, so you will want to install it before anything else.

Installing Locally

To install and run this Helium repo locally, run the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/thoughtindustries/helium

$ cd tooling/helium-server

Workspaces

The Helium Monorepo makes use of npm's workspaces, so the majority of npm commands (such as adding or removing package dependencies) will take place in the root directory. After cloning the repository, running npm install will install all necessary dependencies as well as link any local dependencies.

When installing/uninstalling a dependency within a specific component, you can specify which package the dependency should be installed to by utilizing the -w flag during install (Note: command should be run from root directory):

$ npm install example-dependency -w ./packages/example-component

This is especially helpful for internal library components, as it will allow you to see changes to linked components without needing to publish changes.

Developing in the Component Library

When adding a new component you'll want to be sure to define a new workspace with npm init (Note: command should be run from root directory):

$ npm init -w ./packages/new-example-component

This Header component is a helpful reference for the basic building blocks we'll need for each component.

First is the component itself. While written in typescript, you'll notice there are no scripts to compile these during build/release. Vite will compile these during the build process, so no need to do it ourselves at the moment. For styling, we will want to utilize Tailwind as much as possible.

When it comes to translations, we are utilizing i18next. An i18next instance is passed down via a Provider in the project template, so the component just needs to handle calling the translate function as seen here. Note: any translation keys used in components should also be added to the resources property used in Storybook's i18n instance seen here.

Which brings us to Stories! Helpful for seeing components without needing to add/link them to an existing Helium project, Storybook can be run from the root with (Note: command should be run from root directory):

Once running, the Storybook will be visible at localhost:6006.

Beyond local development, the Storybook is also intended as a way for external users to preview the component library. Whenever component additions/changes are merged into main the Storybook is re-built and published here: https://thoughtindustries.github.io/helium.

Finally, tests! Because these tools and components are intended for external consumption, it's imperative that each is accompanied with a test suite. These are straightforward enough to set up, and simple to run with the command jest --watch (Note: as with npm workspace commands, this should be run from root as well).

Note: Both Storybook and Jest are configured to find the necessary stories/tests under /packages/*/stories/*.stories.tsx and /packages/*/__tests__/*.test.tsx, so no need to register them with either service.

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