Sms Alert System for Scala

Below you will find basic setup instructions for developing the SysmAlertSystem.

To begin with, please ensure you have the following installed on your local development system:

• JDK 8
• SBT

JDK8 is currently required due to some incompatibilities between SBT's ivy implementation and JDK9

Twilio Setup

You'll need a Twilio account to send and receive messages. You can sign up for a trial account for free.

After signing up, click on "Get Started" and follow the screens to create a phone number. This is the number that will be used for subscribing to the alert system.

You'll need to configure Twilio to communicate with the webhook endpoint in this Scala application. Go to "Manage Numbers" and click the number you created. On the configuration screen, scroll to the "Messaging" section and find the label "A Message Comes In". Make sure "Webhook" is selected and enter the web-accessible URL of your application with the following path:

http://your.domain/twilio/message

If you are running on a local development instance behind a NAT/firewall, you can use ngrok to create a tunnel from a web-accessible address to your machine.

Getting Started: Running Locally

There are three ways that the service can be run locally:

Service Environment	Database Environment
Host	Host
Host	Docker
Docker	Docker

Using setup 3 is the recommended setup for getting started. This is because Docker creates a clean environment so we can ensure that if any issues occur in setup 1 or 2, it's highly likely that its a local environment issue.

For the most rapid development, we recommend using either setup 1 or 2. Setup 2 is optimal in our opinion because it's really easy to create a new clean DB environment and ensure that the DB environment cannot be influenced by any other DB clients you may have running locally.

Service on Host, DB on Host

Start the service using the following command. It will attempt to connect to your locally running SQL database on the standard port, 3306.

cd ScalaSmsAlertSystem
# username = your Account SID
export TWILIO_USERNAME="..."
# password = auth token
export TWILIO_PASSWORD="..."
# the phone number you created
export TWILIO_PHONE="..."
sbt clean compile stage
./target/universal/stage/bin/smsalertsystemv2 \
  -Dplay.evolutions.db.default.autoApply=true \
	-Dplay.http.secret.key=l33t_52uc3 \
	-Dslick.dbs.default.db.user=$MYSQL_USER \
	-Dslick.dbs.default.db.password=$MYSQL_PASSWORD

If the database is listening on a non-standard port, then specify the slick.dbs.default.db.url property, which will have the form:

-Dslick.dbs.default.db.url=jdbc:mysql://0.0.0.0:${PORT_NUMBER}/sms

You can find additional properties in the ./conf/application.conf file. You should now be able to go to your browser and go to the URL http://localhost:${PORT_NUMBER} to use the service.

Service on Host, DB on Docker

First install Docker in which we will create a Docker container running MariaDB. The MariaDB Docker Image is hosted on Docker Hub. To start the container run:

docker run -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD -e MYSQL_DATABASE=sms -p 3306:3306 -d mariadb:latest

This will pull down the latest mariadb image and bind port 3306 on the host to 3306 on the container. If you have a locally running database already, then you will need to use a different port.

This command will start a Docker container using the latest version of mariadb configured to use the password specified by MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD. The -p option is used to map the port 3306 on the local host to the 3306 port in the Docker container, which is the port that mariadb will be listening on. If you want to have the database listening on a different host port, you an option such as -p 6033:3306. This will be needed if you have a locally running database that has already bound to that port. You will also need to configure the service to use the non-standard port, which was mentioned in the previous section.

You can test if the Docker container is working by using a mysql client that you have installed locally:

mysql -h 0.0.0.0 -p -u root

Description of the options are:

• -h: specifies the host
• -p: specifies that a password is required; you will be prompted and should enter whatever value was used for MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD
• -u: the user to connect as

You can then start the service the same as the previous section using the properties:

-Dslick.dbs.default.db.user=root \
-Dslick.dbs.default.db.password=$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD

By default, the service is configured to use the password example, but this is obviously not used in production and is just a default value.

Service on Docker, DB on Docker

We will use Docker Compose to run the service and DB in a Docker container. Please see the Docker Compose Installation page for installation instructions. Docker compose will run the instructions specified in the docker-compose.yml file. Running and tearing down is very easy:

docker-compose up -d
docker-compose down

This will start both the DB and the service in a docker container and set up the necessary links between them.

Deploying to the Cloud

The cloud formation stack is found in the repository:

• sms-alert-system-cloud-formation