Avalanche Canada

![dependencies] (https://david-dm.org/avalanche-canada/ac-web.png)

Web app and RESTful API as used by Avalanche Canada Contact [email protected] for more details or to get invoved.

Technical Architecture

client side

• Boilerplate scaffolded using Yeoman and the generator-angular-fullstack.
• AngularJS .
• Angular UI.
• Angular Bootstrap
• Font Awesome
• Grunt-based build system to ensure maximum productivity.
• Bower package management
• Compass
• SASS
• AC-COMPONENTS Re-Usable components developer by Avalanche Canada
• Prismi.io Content Management
• Leaflet Mobile Friendly Interactive Maps
• Mapbox

server side

• NodeJS
• ExpressJS
• Redis via AWS Elasticache
• AWS DynamoDB
• AWS S3

Prerequisites

The RESTful api uses a few external resource which need to be configured.

AWS Resources: which means you will need an AWS key/pair set in order to use these resource. There are a numbers of strategies to pass in credentials as described in the AWS NodeJS Configuration Guide.

Auth0: In order to be able to parse the jwt on the server we need to configure the express-jwt middleware by passing in our Auth0 application client information.

Redis: The application uses Redis as a caching layer. Redis need to be installed and running on localhost port 6379. The redis host is defined using environment variables.

Local Development

For development the recommended startegy is to use profiles via ~/.aws/credentials file.

[default] ; the default profile
aws_access_key_id = ...
aws_secret_access_key = ...

[personal-account] ; my "avalanche-canada" profile
aws_access_key_id = ...
aws_secret_access_key = ...

For development add a .env file in the project root with the following contents:

AWS_PROFILE=avalanche-canada
SESSION_SECRET=mysessionsecret
AUTH0_CLIENT_ID=myauth0clientid
AUTH0_CLIENT_SECRET=myauth0clientsecret
REDIS_HOST='127.0.0.1'
NO_CACHE_REFRESH=true
MINSUB_DYNAMODB_TABLE='mountain-info-network'

The NO_CACHE_REFRESH environment variable controls wether the cache refreshes on a specified interval set in the application. For local and dev env its recommended to leave this to true.

Quick Start

Install Node.js and Ruby then:

$ gem install compass
$ sudo npm -g install grunt-cli karma bower 
$ npm install
$ bower install
$ grunt serve

To run jslint to check javascript quality run:

grunt jshint

Configuring AWS environments

For production the best practice is to use an ec2 instance profiles and set the required permissions on it using policies.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "Stmt1416283589000",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "dynamodb:BatchGetItem",
        "dynamodb:BatchWriteItem",
        "dynamodb:DeleteItem",
        "dynamodb:GetItem",
        "dynamodb:ListTables",
        "dynamodb:PutItem",
        "dynamodb:Query",
        "dynamodb:Scan",
        "dynamodb:UpdateItem"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:dynamodb:myregion:mytable"
      ]
    },
    {
      "Sid": "Stmt1416283613000",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "s3:PutObject",
        "s3:PutObjectAcl"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::mybucket/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

When using elastic beanstalk you can set the instance profile at environment creation using the console, cli or eb tool. You can also change the instance profile using the same tools at a later point.

The follwing environment variables also need to be set on the server:

SESSION_SECRET=mysessionsecret
AUTH0_CLIENT_ID=myauth0clientid
AUTH0_CLIENT_SECRET=myauth0clientsecret
REDIS_HOST='yourredishost'
NO_CACHE_REFRESH=true
MINSUB_DYNAMODB_TABLE='dynamotablename'