The first round could not photograph a few screens because the service behind them was not there: Dawarich, AirTrail, a document store, the booking extractor. They are there now, so the guides are too. - map-dawarich-trail, dawarich-countries and dawarich-wishes: the run uploads a recording of the seeded trip, and of the year before it, into a Dawarich of its own (dawarich-track.ts) and reads it back. - airtrail-import: four flights are put into an AirTrail account, two of them connecting in Tokyo, so the picker offers the layover. - import-booking-file and import-transport-file: the confirmations carry their facts as schema.org data the way portals send them, the extractor reads them, and the guides go on to the filled-in form and the card. - files-sync and document-providers: a Nextcloud folder with two documents in it, bound to the trip, and the switches in the admin panel. - read-place: three seeded places carry their OpenStreetMap id, so the card shows the week's hours, the phone number and the Open or Closed ring. The rating stays Google's, and the texts say so now. - map-compass on the MapLibre renderer, which the guide switches to and back; files-preview opens a PDF, which needs the full browser rather than the headless shell (channel: chromium on the help-media project). Each of those takes an address and a key from e2e/help/media.env, which is not committed; media.env.example and the README say what each one needs and why the address has to be the machine's own on the network. The seed's dates are offsets from the day the pictures are taken (e2e/dates.ts): the trip ends today, so the boarding pass, What's Next and the forecast have something to show whenever the run happens, and nobody bumps a date in three files every few weeks. run.mjs fixes the day once per run so the projects and the workers agree across midnight.
Help-center media
Every picture the help center shows is made here, by Playwright, against the real app. Nothing is drawn or cropped by hand, so a new screen gets pictures in exactly the same style by following the same path.
The style, in one place
Everything visual is fixed in guide.ts and promote.mjs; change it there, never
in a script.
| What | Where | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Viewport | guide.ts VIEWPORT |
1920 × 1080, device scale 2 (playwright.config.ts, project help-media) |
| Step picture frame | guide.ts frameFor |
16:10, at least 960 px wide, 64 px padding around the target, centred on it; a target taller than the frame is shown from its top |
| Ring around the target | guide.ts ring |
3 px in the app's --accent, 12 px radius, 6 px outside the element, the rest dimmed 30 %; a numbered badge (step number) at the top-left corner |
| Drag & drop | guide.ts ringDrag (a step with dropTo) |
source ringed and numbered, destination ringed dashed, a bowed arrow from the one to the other, both undimmed |
| Hover | captureGuide |
the target is hovered before the shot (tooltips, hover-only buttons show); hover overrides where the centre is wrong |
| Result picture | guide.media.result |
the full frame after the last step, pointer parked in the corner |
| Hero (screen overview) | captureHero |
the full frame of the screen as the reader finds it |
| Output | promote.mjs |
PNG → WebP quality 84; steps 1440 px wide, heroes and results 1920 px; into public/help-media/<guide-id>/step-<n>.webp, result.webp, ctx/<screen-id>.webp |
| No videos | stills only, by decision |
The app's own appearance is the default theme, English, light mode, the seeded
demo data (e2e/screenshots/seed.ts) plus the fixtures in fixtures.ts. Do not
change the theme, the language or the zoom for a picture.
How a screen gets its pictures
- Register the screen and its guides in
src/help/contexts/<screen>.tsandsrc/help/registry.ts; write the English texts as a block inshared/src/i18n/en/help.ts(// ── Screen: <id>). Guide ids are global: one id, one picture directory, so never reuse an id from another screen (registry.test.tsrefuses duplicates). - Write
e2e/help/<screen>.guide.ts: oneGuideScriptper guide, exactly oneStepActionper registered step,startthat opens the screen,cleanupthat puts the seed back. A step'stargetis the element the text tells the reader to use;preparegets there,actdoes what the text says. - Run
npm run help:media -- <screen>.guide.ts(own ports 5183/3011, fresh database, the seed, then the file). Fix until every guide passes; a failing step is a text that no longer matches the UI. - Look at the pictures in
e2e/.tmp/help-media/, thennode e2e/help/promote.mjs. - Translate the block into all 22 locales (
i18n:parity:strictis the gate) and runsrc/help/registry.test.ts, which checks every promised picture is on disk.
Rules learned the hard way
- Never edit
shared/while a media run is going: the watcher rebuildsdistmid-run and the pictures show raw i18n keys. - Never
npm run build --workspace=sharedwhilenpm run devis running; restart the dev server if it happened. - Each run boots a fresh server (~2 min); batch fixes, and dump the accessibility
tree once (
page.locator('body').ariaSnapshot()) instead of guessing locators. - A plugin installed by a run lives in
server/data/plugins/; the dev server imports it on its next restart. Guides that install one uninstall it incleanup. - The trip's last day is the run day by construction (
e2e/dates.ts: every seeded date is an offset fromE2E_PICTURE_DAY, whichrun.mjsfixes to today once for the whole run), so the plan opens on today, the trip's last and empty day;openTripintrip-shared.tsselects day 1 and closes its details panel. A guide that has to find a date by its label builds it with the same helpers (short,long,pickerLabel,dotted) instead of writing a calendar date.
The guides that show another service
A few guides picture TREK talking to something outside it: AirTrail (flights
into the Transports tab), Dawarich (the recorded route on the map, countries
and wishes in the Atlas), a document store (Nextcloud on the Files tab) and the
booking extractor (confirmations into Bookings and Transports). Their fixtures
in external.ts fill each service themselves through its API, so the pictures
do not depend on what happens to be in it; they need its address and key from
e2e/help/media.env (copy media.env.example, not committed). Without the
file those guides fail loudly at their first step and every other guide runs
as before.
- Every address has to be the machine's LAN address: the server's SSRF guard
refuses loopback whatever
ALLOW_INTERNAL_NETWORKsays, and that flag has to betruein the same file for a private network to be reachable at all. - AirTrail: any instance with one user and an API key from Settings > Security. The fixture puts four flights into that account.
- Dawarich: any 1.15 instance with a user and their API key; add the LAN address
to its
APPLICATION_HOSTS, and give it a reverse geocoder (Nominatim works) or the Atlas dialog finds no countries. The fixture uploads a synthetic recording of the trip and of the year before it (dawarich-track.ts). - Nextcloud: an app password. The fixture keeps a folder under
/Reisenwith two documents, and the guide binds the trip to it. - The extractor:
KITINERARY_EXTRACTOR_PATHmust point at a program the server can run with one file argument. On Linux that is the package's binary (libkitinerary-bin); on Windows, a small executable that runs it inside the TREK Docker image (docker run --rm -v <dir>:/in:ro --entrypoint /usr/local/bin/kitinerary-extractor <image> /in/<file>) and answers--versionby itself.