easi-app

CMS EASi Application

This repository contains the application code for CMS EASi (Easy Access to System Information).

This application has the following main components:

• A React frontend, using Apollo.
• A Go backend that provides REST and GraphQL APIs.
• A Postgres database.
• A few lambda functions for PDF generation and file upload virus scanning.

Documentation

• Program Background
• Development environment setup
• Contributing
• Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)
• Frontend docs
• Backend docs
• Running development tasks with scripts/dev - includes instructions on running the application locally
• GraphQL development
  • Playground usage
  • Schema modification and backend code
  • Frontend code
• Working with the database - includes instructions on modifying the database schema
• Testing locally
• Docker Compose files and usage
• Deployment Process
• Interacting with CEDAR - CEDAR is a CMS system whose API we interact with; this includes instructions on how to connect to it

Repository Structure

This repository has several major subfolders:

• .github contains GitHub-related configuration; notably, .github/workflows contains the workflow definitions for CI/CD through GitHub Actions.
• .storybook contains configuration for Storybook, which can be used for viewing and designing React components in isolation.
• .vscode contains settings and suggested extensions for developing in VS Code.
• cmd contains Go CLI scripts for various utilities.
• config/tls contains certificates that need to be trusted by the EASi backend.
• cypress contains end-to-end/functional tests using [Cypress][https://www.cypress.io/], as well as necessary configuration.
• docs contains general documentation for the EASi application; the docs/adr subfolder contains records of architectural decisions, while docs/operations contains information on operational procedures such as deploying the application.
• migrations contains SQL files that together define the database schema; these are deployed using Flyway.
• pkg contains the Go source code for the application's backend.
• public contains static assets for the frontend.
• scripts contains Bash and Ruby scripts used for various development and operational tasks.
• src contains the TypeScript source code for the application's React frontend.

Optional Setup

LaunchDarkly

The app uses LaunchDarkly to control feature flags in deployed environments. By default the application run in offline mode and uses default values for all flags. To enable loading the flags from LaunchDarkly, add the following to .envrc.local:

export LD_SDK_KEY=sdk-0123456789
export FLAG_SOURCE=LAUNCH_DARKLY

These values can be obtained from the LaunchDarkly settings page or from 1Password.

To modify the default flags being used, edit src/views/FlagsWrapper/index.tsx. In the call to asyncWithLDProvider() inside useEffect(), modify the values being passed as the flags option.

1Password

See also: ADR on how we share secrets

Truss have set up a 1Password vault for EASi engineers to securely share secrets, such as API keys. You will need to be invited to generate login credentials.

If you need access to a secret that is not in the EASi vault, please ask for someone to add it to the vault.

Cloud Services

You may need to access cloud service to develop the application. This allows access to AWS resources (ex. SES Email).

Follow the instructions in the infra repo here. You'll need to add the infra account environment variables to your .envrc.local. You can then run the ctkey command to get/set AWS environment variables.

https_proxy=localhost:8888 \\
ctkey --username=$CTKEY_USERNAME \\
--password=$CTKEY_PASSWORD \\
--account=$AWS_ACCOUNT_ID \\
--url=$CTKEY_URL \\
--idms=$CT_IDMS \\
--iam-role=$CT_AWS_ROLE setenv

Eventually, we will move this over to wrapper so developers do not need to manually run these commands.

Development and Debugging

(#authentication)

Authentication

The application has two authentication modes. The main mode is to use Okta to authenticate using hosted services. The second is to use a local-only login mode that avoids this network dependency.

To sign in using local mode, Click the Use Local Auth button on the sign in page. This is only provided when running the app locally.

To enable Okta authentication locally, add the following values to .envrc.local:

export OKTA_TEST_USERNAME=
export OKTA_TEST_PASSWORD=
export OKTA_TEST_SECRET=

These values can be found in 1Password under "CMS IDM Test Account".

Accessing the application over Tailscale

Tailscale is a tool that provides secure networks between devices and can be used to access locally running programs from other machines without exposing ports on the open internet. It's a convenient alternative to a traditional VPN.

scripts/dev tailscale will configure and start the app so it can be accessed over a Tailscale network. This is currently used by developers to perform accessibility audits of locally running applications through JAWS on cloud Windows instances.

Routes Debugging

Setting the DEBUG_ROUTES environment variable, and upon startup, this will log out a representation of all routes that have been registered.

$ DEBUG_ROUTES=1 ./bin/easi serve
...
ROUTE: /api/v1/healthcheck
Path regexp: ^/api/v1/healthcheck$
Queries templates:
Queries regexps:

ROUTE: /api/graph/playground
Path regexp: ^/api/graph/playground$
Queries templates:
Queries regexps:
...

Minio

MinIO is an S3 compatible object store. It ships as a Docker container and accepts normal AWS S3 API requests. This allows us to test file uploading functionality in our local development environments without needing to interact with CMS AWS accounts.

The container is configured as part of our docker-compose.yml and should be running when you scripts/dev up.

The container is accessed from the browser using the hostname minio. To make this work, run scripts/dev hosts:check and press enter to setup this hostname on your machine.

You can use scripts/dev minio:clean, scripts/dev minio:infected, or scripts/dev minio:pending to modify the virus scanning status of files in minio during development.