This is the core module of Strautomator, containing most of its business logic. This project doesn't run by itself, but is used by the Web and Functions.
Some main points to know before you start:
Mandatory credentials:
Optional credentials:
Please note that most of the services listed above have a free / trial version, which should be enough for testing or a single user use case. For multiple power users, you might need to subscribe to paid plans.
Once you have created a project in GCP, it's recommended to create a dedicated service account with full permissions to Firestore and Storage Buckets. You could also use an existing service account, as long as you make sure it has the aforementioned permissions.
You'll need to download a set of JSON credentials for that account:
Keys
tab, then click on Add Key
> Create new key
.JSON
format and create.~/gcp-strautomator.json
, on your home folder.Strautomator is using the SetMeUp module to handle its settings, so for detailed info please check its docs. The settings are split as follows:
Additionally, you can also define settings via environment variables, prefixed by SMU and separating levels with underscore. So for instance to define the app.title
via an environment variable, you should set the value on $SMU_app_title
. To define gcp.projectId
, use $SMU_gcp_projectId
. And so on.
If you want to download settings from Google Cloud Storage, you must define the gcp.downloadSettings.bucket
(or via the $SMU_gcp_downloadSettings_bucket
env variable). The default filename is settings.secret.json
, but you can change that as well. The settings file downloaded from GCS will NOT persist on the disk.
Please note that settings specific to the web server, API and other web-specific features are defined on files directly on the Strautomator Web. Same procedure, same logic.
By default Strautomator uses Google Cloud Firestore to store its data. But the database wrapper was made in such a way that it should be pretty easy to implement other document based data stores as well, such as MongoDB or DynamoDB.
The following collections are used:
Also note that these collections might have a suffix, depending on the settings. On development, the default suffix is -dev
.
Some indexes are needed in Firestore. At the moment there's no automated creation, so you might see some warnings or errors on the logs asking to create an index before a specific query can be executed. Just follow the links provided directly on the console logs.
Strautomator will store some files on Google Cloud Storage buckets:
bucket-calendar.strautomator.com
bucket-gdpr.strautomator.com
Buckets can have an optional TTL (days) policy, also defined on the settings as "ttlDays". If a bucket does not exist, it will be created during startup. If no "location" is set directly on the bucket settings, then the default is taken from the setting gcp.location
.
By default, buckets in production are created as CNAME records. This can be disabled by setting the settings.storage.cname
flag to false.
Please make sure that the service account being used has full permissions to read and write to your GCP project Storage buckets. Otherwise you'll have to create the buckets manually and assign the required permissions via the GCP Console.
All the necessary commands to update, build and deploy the Strautomator Core are done using make. For instance, to update the Node.js dependencies and set a new package version:
$ make update
Or to do a "dry run" and test the startup routine with the current settings:
$ make dry-run
Please have a look on the provided Makefile for all available commands.
Strautomator is currently optimized to run on Google Cloud Platform. It makes use of Firestore, Cloud Storage, and various other Google APIs to get things working. There are no plans to port the code to make it work in other ecosystems, but as all the code is wrapped in its own specific set of modules, such tasks should be easily doable.