RSE Admin - Strapi

A Strapi powered backend for the RSE Admin Tool

About

The RSE Admin tool is for tracking the assignment of RSEs to projects, cost recovery and project status. Authentication is managed by University AAD and the backend app brings together data from HubSpot, Clockify and the University Leave System. It also connects to a database to store users and assignment data. All of this is presented via a REST API consumed by the SPA code.

Project Team

Mark Turner, Newcastle University (mark.turner@newcastle.ac.uk)
Kate Court, Newcastle University (kate.court@newcastle.ac.uk)
Becky Osselton, Newcastle University (rebecca.osselton@newcastle.ac.uk)

RSE Contact

Mark Turner
RSE Team
Newcastle University
(mark.turner@newcastle.ac.uk)

Built With

The application uses Strapi to create a role-based middleware app to fetch data from multiple sources. Some are third-party services and others are databases or files included as part of the app. There are third-party Strapi plugins for powering the auto-generation of API documentation and connectivity with Sentry.

Strapi
Sentry
Swagger
HubSpot API
Clockify API

Getting Started

Prerequisites

A local version of NodeJS (nvm is recommended) between 12.x.x and 16.x.x.

A local MySQL Community Server running for development. Whilst possible to interact with the database via an interactive shell, it is recommended to use a GUI tool such as MySQL Workbench.

The .env file needs to be setup with the database credentials for the connection string, these will be unique to each setup. It is HIGHLY recommended not to use the default root user and instead generate a new user with only the right level of access to the rseadmin schema.

Installation

Install dependencies

yarn install

Running Locally

In order to use the admin portal the code needs to be built from source. To do that run

yarn build

Run with hot reload for development

yarn develop

Once running, you may need to change the redirect URL that is used after you have authenticated. Strapi gets this value from the database and so, if using a database dump from production, it may redirect you to the production url. To change this, log into the Strapi admin UI, go to Settings > Providers, and edit the Microsoft provider. Change the redirect URL to http://localhost:3000/auth/login.

Deployment

Local

Deploying to a production style setup but on the local system. The following command builds a Docker container configured with the variables for a production environment with a tag of latest.

docker build -t rseadmin.azurecr.io/api .

Production

Deployment to production is handled by GitHub Workflows in the .github/workflows directory.

Usage

Any push to the dev branch will trigger a rebuild of the latest tag for the Docker image stored in the rseadmin.azurecr.io registry. Properly tagged images are generated via releases on the main branch and match the version number from the release. For example, a code release of version 1.2.3 will create a Docker image in the registry with name and tag of rseadmin.azurecr.io/api:1.2.3.

Roadmap

• [x] Initial Research
• [x] Minimum viable product
• [x] Alpha Release
• [ ] Feature-Complete Release

Contributing

Main Branch

Protected and can only be pushed to via pull requests. Should be considered stable and a representation of production code.

Dev Branch

Should be considered fragile, code should compile and run but features may be prone to errors.

Feature Branches

A branch per feature being worked on.

https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

License