ThesisPortal

Portal für Abschlussarbeiten - Bachelorpraktikum 2022/23

Development Setup

1. Prerequisites

1.1. Node / npm

Install nodejs version 16 or higher. LTS is recommended. You can use nvm to simplify the process of installing nodejs

1.2. Database: SurrealDB

Install SurrealDB

2. Setup project

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/DataManagementLab/ThesisPortal.git
2. Install the dependencies: npm install or npm i
3. Edit the .env file in the projects root directory
   • PUBLIC_HOST / PUBLIC_PORT: this is the host and port the project is running on. Also, this this the url where you get sent to after logging into the SSO successfully
   • CAS_HOST / CAS_VERSION: this is the connection data to the SSO
   • JWT_SECRET: this is a secret string of data used to sign the auth tokens. The recommended size for the secret is 32 characters.
   • DB_HOST / DB_USER / DB_PASSWORD / DB_NAMESPACE / DB_DATABASE: this is the connection to the database
4. Start the database (see here for additional startup options): surreal start --log trace --user root --pass pass where trace can also be debug to get additional debug information. user and pass should be changed to something secure, and these must be the same as in your .env-file. the database now starts on port 8000 by default.

   Attention: By default surrealdb stores all data in memory only which means all data is lost when surrealdb is shutdown for whatever reason. You can append a directorypath to the command to safe the data into a directory automatically! surreal start --log trace --user root --pass pass file://./path/to/db

5. Start the development server: npm run dev (If you have trouble accessing the site using the url as specified in your .env-file (PBL_HOST) use the following command: npm run dev -- --host

   Notice: for the development environment you need to add an entry to your hosts file (/etc/hosts on linux and MacOS, C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows) forwarding the domain thesisfinder-local.tu-darmstadt.de.test to your local machine 127.0.0.1. Note that the entries must be separated by a Tab, not spaces! The line in the hosts file should look something like this:

127.0.0.1	thesisfinder-local.tu-darmstadt.de.test

Deploying

Once you want to deploy the project make sure to follow the same steps as the development setup until 2.4 Now build the project using npm run build. This produces a build folder containing the compiled sources. If you have not cloned the repo on your target webserver, you can now upload the contents of the build folder to your webserver (make sure nodejs and surrealdb is installed on that one). You can now open the build-folder in the terminal (make sure you see a index.js file from here (e.g. via ls -l). If you see it you can now run node index.js and the server should start on port 3000. If you want to change the port, pass the port aswell as the HOST ip adress as environment variable PORT=443 HOST=localhost node index.js Done!

Security

This project generates a self-signed certificate to use for https. If you want to use custom certificates (which is recommended as selfsigned certificates wont get generally excepted by browsers) you must edit the vite.config.js and replace the https block with the following:

https: {
            key: "path/to/privkey.key",
            cert: "path/to/cert.crt",
        }

As an alternative you could route connections through a https enabling proxy like nginx or apache2. When deploying you should also change the port to 80(or 443 when using https respectively). Additionally you should configure the firewall on the webserver so that only the port of the webserver is accessible publicly. Though no one should be able to access the database due to missing credentials the database should not be accessible from the internet to improve security. If not changed manually you should block external access on the database port 8000