WonByCheckmate

Chess.com API for statistical information on players.

Azure Cloud setup

App Services

• Create app service for API and for frontend

Database

• Create Azure Database for MariaDB
• Allow connection from your PC (for local debugging) and connections from one of the outbound ip addresses of the API app service under Connection security
  • The outbound ip addresses of app services can be found under Networking

DNS and TLS

• Buy a domain name
• CNAME record mapping:
  • Create a CNAME and TXT record for binding existing azurewebsites.net domain to domain name
    • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/app-service-web-tutorial-custom-domain
    • Custom Domain Verification ID can be found in the Custom domains blade under the frontend app service
    • The asuid.appname.com TXT record is used for security in verifying DNS entries for app services
      • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/subdomain-takeover
    • Creating a CNAME www.customdomain.com -> appservicename.azurewebsites.net and then adding another custom domain under Custom domains is how you can add subdomains, in this case www.
      • Another certificate would be required to add TLS per subdomain unless using wildcards
• A record mapping:
  • Similar to above, we can create a TXT record with the asuid of the app service, then an A record with the inbound app service IP for each subdomain
    • With no subdomain we can access appname.com
  • There may be a small bug where you first need to create the Private Key Certificates under CNAME records, then delete the CNAME records, then make the A records to get HTTPS to work
• Under Custom domains, add a custom domain and add the domain name you bought
• Under TLS/SSL settings, create a free Create App Service Managed Certificate under Private Key Certificates (.pfx) and select the domain name.
• Go back to Custom domains add SNI SSL binding and chose the certifcate you just created

Environment variables

• Create these in the Configuration blade of the API app service
• Create environment variables:
  • CHESS_DB - Connection string of the database
  • FRONTEND_ENDPOINT - URL of the frontend
  • APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY - Application insights key

Deploying

Azure DevOps

Build

Infrastructure as code for the build defined inside azure-pipelines.yml.

Release

For deploying to Linux App Services, this startup command will be required: dotnet /home/site/wwwroot/API.dll where API is the name of the application.

CORS issues

• For some reason running Angular on localhost resulted in seemingly unavoidable CORS issues when calling the chess API causing requests to fail
• This could have been due to forgetting some request header or using the wrong request object
• Current solution/work around is to create a backend API to make the requests to the chess API

Backend

.NET Core API written as a wrapper to the chess.com API to parse the entire game archives of a chess.com user and return statistics of how the games ended as JSON.

Frontend

• Angular to display JSON returned from API as a table.
• Chart.js to display pie charts.
  • https://valor-software.com/ng2-charts/

Database

Mariadb

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39189451/mariadb-install-in-ubuntu-16-04

Entity Framework

Azure only supports up to version 10.3 for MariaDB and that's the lowest version EF supports using Pomelo library

• https://github.com/PomeloFoundation/Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql

Making a migration and updating

• dotnet ef migrations add InitialCreate -o Data/Migrations
• dotnet ef database update