Nabu was the Babylonian and Assyrian god of scribes, literacy, and wisdom.

Getting started

Requirements

• Node 18 or higher
• NPM
• PostgreSQL 9.5 or higher
• SQLite3 (system software)
• Docker (for database migrations)

Checking for node:

node -v

Instructions for updating NodeJS on Linux

Installing modules

npm install

The npm SQLite3 module may need to be built from source in order to comply with the version of Node on your system, as well as the system's architecture. Then, if running node app.js or nodejs app.js shows errors with SQLite, run the following:

npm uninstall sqlite3
npm install sqlite3 --local --build-from-source
npm rebuild

Setting environment variables

Create a .env file and populate it. The .env-example file provides a template for this. If a variable in this file is also set on the system, the file variable will not overwrite the system variable. You will have to decide what you want your DB_NAME, DB_USER and DB_PW to be. If you are running on your local machine, the DB_HOST will be localhost. The [...temporaryLocation...] blocks can be anywhere on your computer. The [..projectLocation...] is the location of the nabu directory on your file system, and IGNORE_ADDRESS can be left blank.

Create a PostgreSQL database

Set up the same user and password as in your .env file

$ sudo -u postgres createdb ${DATABASE}
$ sudo -u postgres psql
# create user ${USER};
# alter role ${USER} with password '${PASSWORD}';
# grant all on database ${DATABASE} to ${USER};
# \c ${DATABASE}
# grant all on schema PUBLIC to ${USER};
# \q

Migrating the PostgreSQL database (FileQCs)

Database migrations can be applied manually ,but we like Flyway for applying migrations in a controlled way. To use Flyway for migrations, when setting up the database for the first time: Create a file in conf/ called flyway.conf and add to it your database url, user, and password (similar to the .env file. The conf/example-flyway.conf file provides a template for this.

Pull in the Flyway Docker image:

docker pull flyway/flyway

Perform the initial migration using the following:

npm run fw:migrate

After that initial setup, run migrations as necessary using the same command.

Note that if flyway.url includes localhost, the argument --network=host in package.json's fw:clean and fw:migrate are particularly important.

Enabling Authentication

Once the database migrations have been applied, a default authentication API key will need to be generated in order to accessing any endpoints which require authentication. This can be done by access the /token endpoint.

IMPORTANT: Once the first API key is generated, ensure you record the value. You will need it in order to access secure endpoints or generate another token.

Setting up the SQLite database (File Provenance Report)

Nabu uses a SQLite database to store certain fields from the File Provenance Report. This SQLite database should be created in a directory outside of the Nabu directory.

mkdir /path/to/sqlite/dir
export SQLITE_LOCATION=/path/to/sqlite/dir

The rsync_full_fpr.sh script will pull the latest version of the file provenance report, provided your environmental variables in .env are correctly set. If you are working with a local copy of the file provenance report, move or copy it to the $SQLITE_LOCATION directory you just created. The script can then be run without the line that begins with rsync.

• Note that the syntax this script uses is specific to gawk

Running the application

Start PostgreSQL using pg_ctl start -l {DB LOG FILE LOCATION} or any other method.

npm start

A Swagger/OpenAPI page will be available at https://localhost:8443/api-docs/index.html. (The port is 8443 by default; if you want to run Nabu on another port, start it up using HTTPS_PORT=#### npm start.)

Development

Install husky which will lint and prettify files on precommit. Note that this uses npx which is built-in to npm.

npx husky install

Testing

Pull Docker images for postgres and flyway:

docker pull postgres:12-alpine
docker pull flyway/flyway

Run tests using:

npm test