SnowballR Mock Backend

The mock backend is a small self-contained implementation of the gRPC api contract used for testing the frontend without having to spin up a full backend including databases. This application neither implements real api queries for scanning papers, nor does it persist any data.

Caution

Security is an afterthought and this server should never be used in production. Passwords are stored in plaintext and nothing is encrypted.

Building

Make sure you've cloned the repository with the --recursive flag or executed git submodule update --init afterwards.

npm i
npm run compile:proto
npm run build

Usage

npm run start

If connecting from a gRPC web client, the GRPC_WEB_PORT endpoint must be targeted. If using a native client like grpcui or grpcurl, connecting to GRPC_PORT is required.

Alternatively, you can start the application by running: docker compose up --build. The mock backend will be available at http://localhost:3001 per default.

If you're not going to use the mock backend for automated tests, but only to manually check the frontend functionality, it's useful to have some initial data. You can start the mock backend with initial data for this purpose, whereas these initial data must be saved in a typescript file. This file must be located in the src/data/ directory. The data in this file is then imported and, if it is correct, saved as initial data in a "database" with which the mock backend is started. The file is considered to be correct, if it exports an object named exampleData conforming the ExampleData interface, e.g.

export const exampleData: ExampleData = {
    users: users,
    ...
};

Configuration

A boolean variable may be enabled by setting it to either 1, yes, or true.

Environment Variable	Default	Description
GRPC_PORT	3000	The port the native server should listen on
GRPC_WEB_PORT	3001	The port the gRPC web proxy should listen on
ENABLE_DUMMY_ADMIN	false	Whether to enable a dummy admin user
LOG_LEVEL	debug	The log level to use. One of fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace, or silent.
EXAMPLE_DATA_FILE_PATH	""	Relative path to a file inside src/data/ containing example data for the mock backend (e.g. standardData.ts)

Tooling

Both grpcurl and grpcui can be very helpful when getting to know the api or debugging. Install the ones you like and use them like this (replacing the address if needed):

grpcui -plaintext 127.0.0.1:3000
grpcurl -plaintext 127.0.0.1:3000 snowballr.SnowballR.IsAuthenticated

Authorization is handled using a token residing in the Authorization header. In grpcui, this should be added using the header ui. For grpcurl, this can be achieved like this:

grpcurl -plaintext 127.0.0.1:3000 snowballr.SnowballR.CreateProject -d '{"name": "Foo"}' -H Authorization:<access-token>