Ross Wintle Site

Atlas is broken!



I tried sending a <code>revalidate</code> argument to <code>getNextStaticProps</code>. But it didn&#8217;t work. And now I&#8217;m chatting in <code>#pe-atlas-merlin</code> and the engineers are basically saying that <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UWPeyv90iNUdcBsG3WN0QOmeM8gQtNqP0RWIzI-Q6tA/edit">Incremental Static Regeneration doesn&#8217;t work</a>.



Update: it looks like I&#8217;ve uncovered a bug in Faust.js where this <code>revalidate</code> property is not propagated to&#8230; next?



While this was being diagnosed I carried on with learning React in Scrimba.



One of the things I don&#8217;t like about these JS frameworks is that error messages can be so cryptic and unhelpful.



Today I neglected to <code>export</code> a component. And the message I got?



&#8220;A cross-origin error was thrown. React doesn&#8217;t have access to the actual error object in development&#8221;



So basically &#8220;There&#8217;s an error but I can&#8217;t tell you what it is&#8221;.



*sigh*



I did more assembling components though and the syntax of this is becoming second nature now.

Fixing Atlas… maybe?

I spent most of my learning time today figuring out Atlas from <a href="https://developers.wpengine.com/docs/atlas/overview">the docs</a>. There wasn&#8217;t much in there that I didn&#8217;t expect to see. They seem a little out of date, but not horrendously so.



I really wanted an overview of the architecture and maybe more of a &#8220;Quick Start&#8221; guide.



I also found it odd that there&#8217;s an assumption that <a href="https://developers.wpengine.com/docs/atlas/getting-started/deploy-from-existing-repo">you know and will use a JS framework</a>, but that you maybe don&#8217;t have some of the very basics, like <a href="https://developers.wpengine.com/docs/atlas/local-app-development/prerequisites">Git installed</a>. I guess you have to put this in docs, but if feels like one might be able to make some assumptions about the audience?



Anyway, my post from yesterday was still not showing on the front-end. I didn&#8217;t want to perform an app rebuild &#8211; this seems like it shouldn&#8217;t be necessary. So what was wrong?



I dived into the GraphiQL interface to make a query, that brought back my post. So GraphQL seems fine.



And after that the post showed up on the front-end!



So it will be interesting to see what happens when I publish this.



&#8230;



Yep. Latest posts doesn&#8217;t refresh.



Does running the GraphQL query fix that?



Nope.



So what did I do?



The /posts page still hasn&#8217;t updated either. Just the latest posts on the homepage.



How do I fix this?!

Figuring out Atlas

I&#8217;ve been learning about headless WP and React using a variety of resources including the <a href="https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact/">free Scrimba React course</a>.



Today I got my complimentary account set up at WP Engine and set up an Atlas site.



I&#8217;d read about <a href="https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109779165326982978">the idea of keeping your own, internal engineering journal</a>, and so my aim is that I&#8217;ll post about learning and work here.



Atlas setup initially went smoothly. I had to give Atlas broad-ranging permissions to GitHub which I didn&#8217;t really like. I wanted to create a repository and give it just access to that. But it&#8217;s OK. I trust Atlas and WPE.



Once set up I had <a href="https://github.com/rosswintle/atlas-headless-test">a repo</a> to explore (this may be private, so you may not be able to see it, but it&#8217;s based on the regular blueprint &#8211; I can&#8217;t find a link to this, but the <a href="https://developers.wpengine.com/docs/atlas/overview">Atlas Docs</a> have some info on it)



The repo seems to contain a lot of boilerplate. This is something I&#8217;ve seen in Next/React projects. Little files with just a few lines that don&#8217;t seem to do anything other than reference other things. This all seems a bit odd to me. But I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll get used to it.



I also went into WordPress and deleted all of the posts to have a clean slate for this blog, but the front-end still shows all the posts. I thought it would rebuild automatically?



Need to look at the docs.



Links to follow up on:



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>https://developers.wpengine.com/docs/atlas/overview</li>



<li>https://developers.wpengine.com/blog/what-is-faust-js-the-headless-wordpress-framework</li>
</ul>

Tag: Headless

Fixing Atlas… maybe?

Figuring out Atlas

Getting started with Atlas