A Strapi powered backend for the RSE Admin Tool
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.
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)
Mark Turner
RSE Team
Newcastle University
(mark.turner@newcastle.ac.uk)
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
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.
Install dependencies
yarn install
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.
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 .
Deployment to production is handled by GitHub Workflows in the .github/workflows directory.
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.
- Initial Research
- Minimum viable product
- Alpha Release
- Feature-Complete Release
Protected and can only be pushed to via pull requests. Should be considered stable and a representation of production code.
Should be considered fragile, code should compile and run but features may be prone to errors.
A branch per feature being worked on.