moonfire-nvr VS console

How do folks test timing-related stuff with MSW? AFAIK, MSW doesn't get along with jest.useFakeTimers. It drives me nuts; I have a bunch of disabled tests in an open-source project and at least one that is flaky because it uses real timers where I'd like to be using fake timers. [1, 2]

I've been thinking about ripping out MSW from my tests in favor of my own API-level mock for this reason. But it seems like many other folks are happy with MSW. I have to assume there's something I'm not getting. I'm a fish out of water with frontend stuff in general...

[1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/5ea5d27908f1a...

[2] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/5ea5d27908f1a...

> I wonder how hard it would be to run your own streamer pipeline or whatnot on these things?

Agree with the_biot: The actual streaming component is not too hard. If this were the biggest problem, I'd be thrilled to contribute to an open source streaming server to complement my open source NVR. [1] The driver situation is indeed a bit harder—these things don't just have mainline Linux support with v4l2 for the video input and encoder. Or open source drivers of any kind to crib from AFAIK.

The biggest problem IMHO is that there just aren't any good cameras to buy, even completely ignoring the software aspect. I want a camera that:

1. doesn't support genocide. Nothing that involves Dahua, Hikvision, or Huawei. See IPVM articles on the subject. And a lot of available cameras are relabeled Dahua/Hikvision stuff and/or use Huawei components.

2. is legal for sale / authorized for use in the US. (See the Secure Equipment Act of 2021.)

3. has good night mode performance: IR/day switch, a sensor that is at least 1/1.8", reasonable resolution (somewhere from HD to 4k).

4. has an "eyeball" or "turret" form factor rather than "bullet". The latter seems to really attract spiders, so you end up with a really nice video of a web...

5. supports PoE.

6. is weatherized (IP66 or so).

7. is reasonably priced.

If you ignore #1 and #2, there's some nice hardware out there, but I'm not willing to do that. If you ignore #3, there are a few options (GeoVision, maybe Reolink, maybe Hanwha.) If you ignore #4 and #7, there might be a couple (Axis, maybe Hanwha.) Nothing that ticks all the boxes.

Hard to get excited about investing a lot in the software when the hardware isn't there.

[1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr

saw one nvr project in rust - https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr - maybe you can find answer there

Moonfire NVR does basically that. No decoding at all. The configuration process could be smoother, but there's a decent setup guide to follow.

This is exactly what you're looking for: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr

But I would definitely avoid compiling Rust on the Raspberry Pi 3 if you can avoid it. I set up a Docker cross-compile environment for this reason.

Moonfire may be what you're looking for otherwise.

That last bit's not quite true: another option is to just use the cameras as a dumb stream source and do all the fanciness in an open source NVR. I've been slowly working on moonfire-nvr. Help welcome!

Moonfire

>https://console-preview.oxide.computer/

That's pretty cool! The design language is a nice touch for sure.

I've used Storybook during development for a while now and the use case you present is how the Storybook is pitched. I actually agree about the simplicity of discovering the components. What I disagree with, though, is that I can't see value of "develop & test your UI independently from your app" part. It forces me to decouple the state from a component and this in turn adds unnecessary complexity to the architecture.

I'm going to use Oxide console [1] as an example because it has a really good setup of MSW + OpenAPI autogenerated mocks (which means that it doesn't need any complete backend, just a defined contract).

Consider this fairly simple page [2]. If I'm using the Storybook pattern, I'm keeping all of the state outside of the component, which means I now have to manually memoize every single variable defined before the return to make sure that the component doesn't do any unnecessary re-renders. This includes `intervalPicker`, `commonProps`, `setFilterId`, every return of `useDateTimeRangePicker`. With MSW I have benefits not needing the API, testing in real production app, using the same exact mocks for unit tests and development.

[1]: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console

[2]: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console/blob/main/app/pages...

SPA mode (what I assume you mean by BFF mode) is brand new, so almost nobody has used it. However, a close example would be the Oxide web console, which we build as an SPA because we want to serve it as static assets from a Rust backend. It's very close to your suggested stack: React + React Router + Tanstack query + zustand, though importantly we also use React Router's loaders to give the app a better-than-SPA feel on navigations. I do plan on moving it to Remix SPA mode when I get a chance, but like I said the result should be very similar so it's not that high a priority for me. If I were starting from scratch I'd probably use Remix SPA.

Repo: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console/

Live demo here with in-browser MSW mock API: https://oxide-console-preview.vercel.app

VPS providers are nice, but they don't provide the same cloud-level capabilities that Oxide offers. Check out the console to get an idea of what I mean (this is a demo with mock data): https://oxide-console-preview.vercel.app/

Yeah, basically. We do it with a function call where the argument to the function is that interface representing all the API endpoints. `makeHandlers` handles parsing path params, query params, and request body and passes them to each endpoint handler. So the runtime validation of request bodies is also generated — we generate a zod schema for each request body in the OpenAPI definition and use it to parse the actual request body that comes in.

big function call https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console/blob/bd65b9da7019ad...

automatic body parsing and argument passing: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console/blob/bd65b9da7019ad...

When an endpoint gets added to the spec, we can rerun the generator and get type errors in the `makeHandlers` telling us endpdoints are missing.