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Maintainability

TIMDEX Is Making Discovery EXcellent @ MIT

This application interfaces with an OpenSearch backend and exposes a GraphQL endpoint to allow anonymous users to query our data.

Architecture Decision Records

This repository contains Architecture Decision Records in the docs/architecture-decisions directory.

adr-tools should allow easy creation of additional records with a standardized template.

Developing this application

  • please bundle exec annotate when making changes to models to update the internal documentation
  • don't commit your .env or .env.development, but do commit .env.test after confirming your test values are not actual secrets that need protecting

Generating cassettes for tests

We use VCR to record transactions with OpenSearch so we will not need to load data for testing during each test run.

We must take care to not record our credentials to any secure OpenSearch clusters we use and we must make sure all cassettes look like the same endpoint.

One option would be to force us to load data locally and only generate cassettes from localhost OpenSearch. This is secure, but is not always convenient to ensure we have test data that looks like production.

The other option is to use deployed OpenSearch and scrub the data using VCRs filter_sensitive_data feature.

The scrubbing has been configured in test/test_helper.rb.

The test recording process is as follows:

  • If you want to use localhost:9200
    • load the data you want and ensure it is accessible via the all-current alias. No other changes are necessary
  • If you want to use an AWS OpenSearch instance

Caution

Use .env and not .env.test to override these values to ensure you do not inadvertantly commit secrets!

  • Set the following values to whatever cluster you want to connect to in .env (Note: .env is preferred over .env.test because it is already in our .gitignore and will work together with .env.test.)
    • OPENSEARCH_URL
    • AWS_OPENSEARCH=true
    • AWS_OPENSEARCH_ACCESS_KEY_ID
    • AWS_OPENSEARCH_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
    • AWS_REGION
  • Delete any cassette you want to regenerate (for new tests, you can skip this). If you are making a graphql test, nest your cassette inside the opensearch_init cassette.

Example of nested cassettes.

test 'graphql search' do
  VCR.use_cassette('opensearch init') do
    VCR.use_cassette('YOUR CASSETTE NAME') do
      YOUR QUERY
      YOUR ASSERTIONS
    end
  end
end
  • Run your test(s). You may receive VCR errors as the opensearch init cassette does not have the HTTP transaction you are requesting. However, the nested cassette for your test will generate if it does not exist yet and on future runs these errors will not recur.
  • Manually confirm the headers do not have sensitive information. This scrubbing process should work, but it is your responsibility to ensure you are not committing secrets to code repositories. If you aren't sure, ask.
  • You have to remove or comment out AWS credentials from .env before re-running your test or the tests will fail (i.e. this process can only generate cassettes, it can not re-run them with AWS credentials as we scrub the AWS bits from the cassette so VCR does not match)

Important

We re-use OpenSearch connections, which is handled by the nesting of cassettes (see above). If you have sporadically failing tests, ensure you are nesting your test specific cassette inside of the opensearch init cassette.

Confirming functionality after updating dependencies

This application has good code coverage, so most issues are detected by just running tests normally:

bin/rails test

The following additional manual testing should be performed in the PR build on Heroku.

  • Use the PR builds GraphiQL playground to run a keyword search such as:
{
  search(searchterm: "thesis") {
    hits
    records {
      title
      source
      summary
      identifiers {
        kind
        value
      }
    }
  }
}
  • Use the PR builds GraphiQL playground to retrieve a single record
{
  recordId(id: "alma:990000959610106761") {
    title
    timdexRecordId
    source
  }
}

The following additional manual check should be performed after the application is deployed to production.

Publishing User Facing Documentation

Running jekyll documentation locally

Documentation is built and deployed via Github Actions. You can run the documentation locally before pushing to Github to ensure everything looks as expected.

bundle exec jekyll serve --incremental --source ./docs

Once the jekyll server is running, you can access the local docs at http://localhost:4000/timdex/

Note: it is important to load the documentation from the /timdex/ path locally as that is how it works when built and deployed to GitHub Pages so testing locally the same way will ensure our asset paths will work when deployed.

Automatic generation of technical specifications from GraphQL

Our GitHub Actions documentation build includes a step that uses SpectaQL to generate technical documentation from our GraphQL spec.

You can generate this locally by installing SpectaQL and generating the html. See Install SpectaQL and Build reference docs in ./.github/workflows/pages.yml for details on this process.

Note: These files are intentionally excluded from version control to ensure the output generated via the Actions step is considered authoritative.

The config file ./docs/reference/_spectaql_config.yml controls the build process for this portion of our documentation and making changes to this file (which is included in version control) would be the main reason to run the process locally.

Required Environment Variables (all ENVs)

  • EMAIL_FROM: email address to send message from, including the registration and forgot password messages.
  • EMAIL_URL_HOST - base url to use when sending emails that link back to the application. In development, often localhost:3000. On heroku, often yourapp.herokuapp.com. However, if you use a custom domain in production, that should be the value you use in production.
  • JWT_SECRET_KEY: generate with rails secret

Production required Environment Variables

  • AWS_OPENSEARCH: boolean. Set to true to enable AWSv4 Signing
  • AWS_OPENSEARCH_ACCESS_KEY_ID
  • AWS_OPENSEARCH_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
  • AWS_REGION
  • OPENSEARCH_INDEX: Opensearch index or alias to query, default will be to search all indexes which is generally not expected. timdex or all-current are aliases used consistently in our data pipelines, with timdex being most likely what most use cases will want.
  • OPENSEARCH_URL: Opensearch URL, defaults to http://localhost:9200
  • SMTP_ADDRESS
  • SMTP_PASSWORD
  • SMTP_PORT
  • SMTP_USER

Optional Environment Variables (all ENVs)

  • OPENSEARCH_LOG if true, verbosely logs OpenSearch queries.

    NOTE: do not set this ENV at all if you want ES logging fully disabled.
Setting it to `false` is still setting it and you will be annoyed and
confused.

  • PLATFORM_NAME: The value set is added to the header after the MIT Libraries logo. The logic and CSS for this comes from our theme gem.

  • PREFERRED_DOMAIN - set this to the domain you would like to to use. Any other requests that come to the app will redirect to the root of this domain. This is useful to prevent access to herokuapp.com domains.

  • REQUESTS_PER_PERIOD - requests allowed before throttling. Default is 100.

  • REQUEST_PERIOD - number of minutes for the period in REQUESTS_PER_PERIOD. Default is 1.

  • SENTRY_DSN: client key for Sentry exception logging

  • SENTRY_ENV: Sentry environment for the application. Defaults to 'unknown' if unset.