An unpleasant journey to try a local build of steemit.com

Today I tried to report an issue for steemit.com app and found that it has already been raised on GitHub. The issue was about the incorrectly displaying of the reputation on the Wallet page. It always shows 25 no matter what's your real reputation is.

Another people raised a similar issue and said that the issue disappears after refreshing. I could confirm the same behaviour but in my case, it happens when switching from other user profile pages to the Wallet page.

The app is written in React which is one of the technologies I've been learning in my spare time recently. It doesn't feel like a difficult issue after quickly looking at the source code on GitHub, so I decided to have a look😎.

The first issue I've been experiencing is that the scripts in package.json are not working on Windows. This is an easy fix as I have fixed similar issue before after introducing cross-env and replace ; with &&✌️.

Then, I could build it without any problem but it crashed after I access the website. It says missing MySQL😨. I stopped using this 'traditional way' of running it and switched to a dockerized method.

This is much easier although I am using Docker Toolbox for Windows. The website runs with one single command.

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 steemit/condenser

But, it crashes again after I access the page🙁. It seems the steemd node has not been specified. As README said, I changed the above command to include two environment variables as this:

 docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -e SDC_CLIENT_STEEMD_URL="wss://steemd.steemit.com" -e SDC_SER
VER_STEEMD_URL="wss://steemd.steemit.com" steemit/condenser

It runs again but still doesn't work and the real pain starts. The error was that steemd.steemit.com can't be resolved. I randomly picked different nodes from here, here and here. None of them work perfectly. I got very slow response, or timeout when accessing some pages, or hit limitation of the API calls or can't login😱.

After all that, I decided to run a P2P node myself and used it instead. The node was easy to start with docker but it doesn't connect to steem network, so I had to create a new account. However, to enable sign up, there are more configurations needed😱.

The story comes to the end and I haven't got the chance to look at the real issue I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I am so curious why so many nodes are not working for me. Most of them have a green light on different status pages.

If you know what I have been doing wrong, please leave a comment. I will continue my investigation later.