Toolbox is an application designed to showcase Hoist, Extremely Heavy's full-stack UI toolkit.

Toolbox consists of both a desktop and mobile app with examples of all Hoist Components, their usage, and links to related Hoist and Toolbox source code. Toolbox also provides several application examples which may be especially useful as a starting point for application developers new to the framework.

Please refer to the Hoist Core and Hoist React repos for detailed information and documentation on Hoist, including more information on configuring a local development environment.

Toolbox is itself a Hoist Application, and we keep it updated with the latest versions of the Hoist Framework. A toolbox-dev instance is auto-deployed via GitHub Actions on each commit to either the Toolbox or Hoist develop branches. We update a distinct "production" instance manually with each new versioned Hoist release. See Build and Deploy for details on the CI/CD workflows.

Toolbox uses MySQL for its configuration database. Note this is not a common choice for Hoist applications, which typically use whatever enterprise database is already in place within a client's infrastructure, but it provides a common and easy-to-run DB for local development and our AWS-based deployments.

• For initial/test usage, Toolbox is can run with a transient in-memory database (H2) that will be rebuilt at startup of the app. This is enabled via the useH2 instance configuration (see below).
• For persistent deployments, Toolbox is designed to work with MySQL. If you don't already have it installed and are on a Mac, we recommend installing via Homebrew with brew install mysql.
• Create a new empty database named toolbox, being sure to use a UTF8 charset (fortunately this is the default for newer versions of MySQL). Alternatively, use an export of the deployed toolbox DB with CREATE DATABASE included (Anselm can provide).
• For local development, use of the root account is fine, or (better) you can create a local user and password dedicated to Toolbox. If using a non-root account, ensure that the user has DBO rights on the new database. Database credentials are provided to the app via instance configuration (see below).
• If the server is started against an empty database, Grails will auto-create the required schemas on first run as long as a suitable value is provided for the dbCreate data source parameter. See the DBConfig class for where this is set - we leave toolbox on update to allow for automatic schema changes as needed.

Hoist applications require low-level "instance configuration" properties to provide settings such as database credentials and other environment-specific settings that should not be checked into source control. These properties can be set in one of two primary ways: a YAML file on the local filesystem, or environment variables.

Toolbox is configured to source these properties from environment variables, and uses a Gradle plugin to read them from a .env file in the project root. That file should never be pushed to git (it's listed in .gitignore accordingly), but an .env.template file is checked-in to enumerate required and optional properties.

Copy .env.template to .env and fill in the required values for your local database connection.

Note that Toolbox uses 'Auth0' as its authentication provider, and includes various client-side and server side adaptors for that. Typical Hoist applications will use an enterprise-specific Single Sign-On (SSO) such as JESPA/NTLM, kerberos, or another OAuth based solution.

When adding a new top-level entry-point for Toolbox (such as a new example application), the desired URL must be registered with Auth0 as a valid OAuth callback URL. Either Lee or Anselm can update our Auth0 config accordingly.

To run Toolbox locally, start the Grails server and the Webpack dev server in separate terminals:

• Server - from the project root: ./gradlew bootRun (serves the API on port 8080).
• Client - from the client-app/ directory: yarn start (serves http://localhost:3000).

Then open http://localhost:3000/app (desktop app), /admin (admin console), or /mobile.

For the complete guide — running against local Hoist framework checkouts, running multiple instances, on-device mobile testing over a network IP, HTTPS setup, and troubleshooting — see Running Toolbox Locally.

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