Grundsteuer

This is the code repository of Grundsteuer by DigitalService.

Important: This project has been discontinued The service "Grundsteuererklärung für Privateigentum" allowed private individuals from July 4th, 2022 to August 31st to hand in their property tax declarations. After this time the service was replaced by a static page.

Quick Start Guide

• Remix Docs

Development

Before starting the app in development mode, you need to have working instances of the following:

• Node.js v16 (see package.json for the pinned version)
• npm
• PostgreSQL (v12)
• Redis (v5 or higher)
• Unleash

Additionally, you need Erica API (actual or mock) for all interactions with Erica/ELSTER. It is technically optional since you can start the app with no running Erica; however, the environment variable ERICA_URL must be set.

We recommend Docker containers for PostgreSQL, Redis and Unleash. Default ports and credentials are configured in .env.example. You also need to create a database named grundsteuer in Postgres. Since setting up Unleash is not as trivial as the others as it requires its own database, we have provided a convenience script:

cd unleash
chmod +x ./create-local-unleash.sh
./create-local-unleash.sh

You can log into this fresh Unleash installation at http://localhost:4242 with the username admin and password unleash4all.

Once everything is up and running, you can start the app for the first time:

npm install
npx prisma migrate dev
npm run dev

This starts the development server on localhost:3000, rebuilding assets on file changes.

The app uses Prisma for database migrations.

You need a local .env file to load configuration parameters from. The default values are stored in .env.example. If no .env exists in project root, npm run dev will create one by copying .env.example. If there are parameters defined in .env.example that are missing in your local .env, the app will fail on startup with an error message indicating the missing keys.

E2E/integration tests

Assuming the Docker daemon is running, you can execute run-e2e-tests-locally.sh and run-integration-tests-locally.sh to execute E2E and integration tests respectively. The script fires up and seeds ephemeral instances of all required services and cleans them up once execution is finished or aborted.

Style (Linting & Formatting)

We use ESLint to find problems in our code and Prettier to enforce consistent formatting.

It's probably a good idea to setup ESLint and Prettier in your editor (it might even be there out-of-the-box). This way you become aware of linting errors immediately while coding. Auto-formatting on saving the file frees you from any manual formatting work.

To be on the safe side ESLint and Prettier are also run on all staged files before a commit. Automatically, so you can't forget it.

Additionally, you can always run ESLint and Prettier manually via npm tasks:

Check style:

npm run style:check

Autofix issues:

npm run style:fix

Deployment

First, build your app for production:

npm run build

Then run the app in production mode:

npm start

Now you'll need to pick a host to deploy it to.

DIY

If you're familiar with deploying node applications, the built-in Remix app server is production-ready.

Make sure to deploy the output of remix build

• build/
• public/build/

Docker Tooling

The Dockerfile is intended for production images. A Docker Compose file, docker-compose-test.yml, is provided to minimize local setup required for running E2E tests.

Production Flow

docker build -t grundsteuer .
docker run --rm -it -p 3000:3000 grundsteuer

This builds and starts your app in production mode.

Console

Usage

npm run console gives you a Node.js REPL with some app modules added to its context. See <PROJECT_ROOT>/console.ts for details.

Development

Please run npm run build:console after changes to <PROJECT_ROOT>/console.ts.

The form logic

To construct our forms we use four different structures:

• State machine: The state machine defines the order of form steps depending on the user data. This can be found in app/domain/states/states.server.ts. The conditions are located in app/domain/states/guards.ts.
• Step definitions: The fields that are used in a step and further information such as validations is defined through the step definition. These can be found in app/domain/steps/index.ts.
• Step-specific components: If a step needs to look different from the DefaultStep, it needs to have a specific StepComponent or StepHeadlineComponent (only title and description). These can be found in app/components/steps/index.ts or app/components/headlines/index.ts.
• Step-specific texts: Texts for each step (like headlines, descriptions, text in help components) need to be set through localization. These texts can be found in public/locales/de/all.json.

These structures are then used in app/routes/formular/_step.tsx to construct a step.