feat: automate frontend API regeneration during live development

[prakharsingh-74]

closes: #857

Description

Currently, the swagger.version Git-hash mechanism prevents the core benefit of Tilt—live iterative development across backend and frontend components—from working when backend API changes are introduced. Uncommitted backend changes are not captured by the Git history, causing local API client generation (npm run generate:api) to fail or fetch outdated schemas.

1. Automatic Generation in Tilt:

   • Added a backend-swagger local_resource in the Tiltfile that watches backend Go files and automatically runs make swag on the host to update the local openapi/swagger.json.
   • Added a frontend-api-generate local_resource in the Tiltfile that watches openapi/swagger.json and runs npm run generate:api on the host.
   • Updated the resource dependency graph so that the workspace containers wait for their respective generation resources to complete before deploying.

2. Conditional Local Swagger Generation:

   • Modified generate-api.sh to check for USE_LOCAL_SWAGGER=true or DEV_ENV=tilt. When active, it directly reads the local swagger.json path or fetches it from a running container URL (using Node.js's built-in fetch to keep container dependencies lean) rather than querying git history.
   • Added CRLF stripping to ensure the Git-hash check works reliably on Windows developer hosts.
   • Prefixed the generate:api npm script command with bash for native Windows execution compatibility.

3. Documentation:

   • Documented the new automated API client regeneration flow in DEVELOPMENT_GUIDE.md.

---

How to Verify

1. Verify Local Generation on Host:

   • Run $env:USE_LOCAL_SWAGGER="true"; npm run generate:api (Windows PowerShell) or USE_LOCAL_SWAGGER=true npm run generate:api (macOS/Linux/Git Bash) inside workspaces/frontend. Verify it generates types using the local swagger.json.

2. Verify Git-Based Generation (CI/Production Mode):

   • Run npm run generate:api without setting the environment variable. Verify it falls back to the original git-hash-based generation.

3. Verify Tilt E2E Loop:

   • Start Tilt via make tilt-up in developing/.
   • Modify a backend Go struct/handler. Verify that:
     1. Tilt runs make swag locally.
     2. Tilt runs generate-api.sh to update the TypeScript types in src/generated/.
     3. Webpack dev server HMR is triggered inside the frontend container.

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[prakharsingh-74]

cc: @andyatmiami

[prakharsingh-74]

@andreyvelich sir, can you review this PR if you're free.

[christian-heusel]

Thanks a lot for your contribution, I have left a few review comments below 🤗

A few general notes:

• Did you use AI in any capacity while creating this contribution? I see that your commit does not carry a Assisted-By: <...> tag, so I wanted to make sure that you're aware of the Kubeflow AI Policy. 🤗 🤖
• Please do not ping external maintainers for your PR, it's okay to make a bit of noise if a PR goes without review, however for example Andrey does not know anything about the codebase here and will not be available to review your changes.
• This is more of a preference thing, but if you rebase your changes against notebooks-v2 instead of merging this keeps the history more clean.

[christian-heusel]

Why do we need to explicitly execute this script with bash? 🤔
The script already has this as shebang, so my intuition would be that this can be dropped 🤔

notebooks/workspaces/frontend/scripts/generate-api.sh

Line 1 in 07a611c

#!/bin/bash

[christian-heusel]

IMO this is not the right approach to the issue we're fixing, why are we fetching this file from a remote endpoint instead of just using the one on disk or regenerating it in a temporary directory? 🤔

[christian-heusel]

The line ending here is not guaranteed to be \r\n, on linux this will just be \n. Probably we should also fix this in .gitattributes so it is predictable accross both os types.

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/426404