Starlight: Sprint 12 (June 9 - June 29, 2021)

Note: We did not record a formal sprint review because the nature of the work accomplished is not something that translates well to a demo.

What was the goal of Sprint 12?
Spotlight 3.0 was released upstream earlier this year and the goal of this sprint was to make progress towards upgrading Starlight to use the 3.0 release. This is a major release that impacts multiple areas of the Starlight code base, including both campus themes. (More information about the Spotlight 3.0 release.) Additionally, another goal of this sprint was to migrate both UCSB instances of Starlight from local hosting to AWS. This sprint was scheduled off-workcycle.

What is the milestone that this sprint is supporting?
Upgrading Starlight to Spotlight 3.0.

Accomplishments of Sprint 12:

• Upgrade Starlight to support Spotlight 3.0, Rails 6, Blacklight 7, and Bootstrap 4
  - Initial update of UCSB theme
  - Initial update of UCSD theme
  - Numerous code, configuration and test updates to align with Spotlight 3.0
• Support an external PostgreSQL database in the Starlight Helm chart
• Support an external Kubernetes Secret in the Starlight Helm chart
• Update Starlight k3d development environment to include optimizations and lessons learned from Comet
  - Removed docker-compose development environment file and documentation to avoid confusion
  - Added a test PostgreSQL database, and configuration to support creating and referencing it in the Helm chart
• Update database import/export scripts to be more compatible with AWS S3
• Refactor database and content migration scripts for Starlight to separate the Solr reindexing from database specific tasks. This was important for supporting external databases and, eventually, external Solr clusters.

Did we do everything we set out to accomplish?

• Database migration process still fails in some circumstances
• The k3d development environment now supports a test database, but is still relying on the single Solr collection. Further work is needed to create a test solr collection for local development.
• Additional theme adjustments are needed for both UCSB and UCSD.

What’s next?
The next Surfliner workcycle begins tomorrow, June 30, 2021. The goal of that workcycle is to make significant progress towards the Comet MVP. The current plan is to continue work on updating the UCSD theme during the next sprint; it is unclear at this time if the team will have the bandwidth to take on any Starlight work in addition to Comet work during the upcoming workcycle.

GitLab link: https://gitlab.com/surfliner/surfliner/-/milestones/62