Roost where owls go to sleep

Roost is an experimental new web-based zephyr client with proper authentication. This is the backend component. The official frontend lives in the companion roost-client.git repository. If you are primarily interested in front-end development, you need only clone that one and develop against the official backend.

https://github.com/davidben/roost-client

Roost subscribes to, logs, and provides an interface for retrieving zephyrgrams on behalf of a user. Public subscriptions are deduplicated and subscribed to with a public subscriber. What differentiates Roost is how it handles personals. Using Webathena, the Roost client gets a hold of a zephyr/zephyr service ticket session for the user. This session is then forwarded to the server which uses it to run a dedicated personals subscriber, known internally as the user's "inner demon". The inner demon handles all personal subs, checks authenticity, and sends outgoing messages.

Authentication to the Roost service itself is done with GSSAPI and Kerberos, also handled in the browser by Webathena. By using Kerberos to properly authenticate zephyr access, we hope that Roost will interoperate better with existing zephyr clients while not requiring the user maintain a client or mirroring script on some dialup. In addition, as the backend API is plain HTTP (and WebSocket) and natively using Kerberos for authentication, we hope it will be natural to write clients for non-web platforms using their native Kerberos mechanisms.

The backend is written in Node.js, using SockJS to provide a WebSockets fallback on older browsers.

Running the backend requires libzephyr 3.1 or newer.

Configuration uses node-convict. Configure with cjson files specified in a comma-separated list in the CONFIG_FILES environment variable. To start, run

Install dependencies

npm install

Database configuration, etc. See lib/config.js for all options.

vim config.json

Generate secrets for sessions, etc.

./bin/generate-secrets.js secrets.json

Initialize database schema.

CONFIG_FILES=secrets.json,config.json ./bin/init-tables.js

Start the server.

CONFIG_FILES=secrets.json,config.json ./bin/server.js

By default, unless you configure a keytab, the server will run in fake authentication mode where it issues a session token for any principal the client requests. This is usually suitable for development, but do NOT run without a real keytab in production.

Run the unit tests with

npm test