Deployment and Configuration

Deployment and Installation Instructions

Production Deployment information

As of now, the project is hosted on a VM provided by UTM. There is an Apache instance listening on ports 80 and 443 and reverse proxies to port 3555.

Our app is self-contained and has its own nginx reverse proxy to have all requests to /api directed to the backend container and all other requests to the frontend container.

GitHub Actions CI is configured to auto-deploy the main branch to the UTM production VM.

The frontend was bootstrapped with create-react-app and is served by serve. The backend is a nodejs app.

There are certain environmental variables that the backend expects. These environment variables may be placed in an .env file in the backend folder, and must never be pushed to the Git history.

Backend enviroment variable name	Purpose
EMAIL_USER	The username used by node_mailer to send emails
EMAIL_PASSWORD	The password used by node_mailer to send emails. Note that an app password may be required for this field.
FRONTEND_URL	The base URL of the frontend deployment, e.g., https://hacklabbooking.utm.utoronto.ca

To deploy, get the latest code, and run docker compose up -d --build. This will start up our application on port 3555. A different port would require modifying the compose file.

Development Deployment via Docker Compose

• make sure docker-compose is installed:

  > docker-compose version
  Docker Compose version v2.17.3

• make sure npm and node are installed:

  > node -v
  v20.3.0
  > npm -v
  8.19.2

• run npm install on the /backend and /frontend directories

  > pwd
  /repos/hacklab-booking # repo root directory
  > cd backend
  > npm install
  > cd ../frontend
  > npm install

• load docker-compose.dev.yml into docker

  > docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d

• once successfully deployed, connect to the frontend by injecting the following request headers to localhost:3555. http_mail is your email, and http_cn is currently unused:

  utorid
  http_mail
  http_cn
  

• connect to PostgreSQL by connecting to jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/postgres with the credentials postgres:example.

  • under the User table, modify your account to have the admin role.

Initial Configuration

After installing and deploying Hacklab Booking, there are additional steps that must be completed first before it can be used.

Creating the first admin account

To create an admin account, start by logging in as a regular user. Your account will be created with a student role. To modify this role without other administrators, you will have to directly modify the PostgreSQL database.

1. Connect to the database by using jdbc:postgresql://<deployment url>:5432/postgres
2. Use the password example to access the User table.
3. Find your utorid and change the role from student to admin.
4. After refreshing your Hacklab Booking System browser window, you will see an administrator button.

Create the first room

1. Access the Admin dashboard, which can be accessed by clicking the "Admin" button on the dashboard
2. Access the Room manager by clicking "Manage rooms" then click "Create room" and fill in the details
3. Click "Add"
4. In the "Control access" page, select at least one approver who can approve requests for that room
5. The room is now ready to accept booking requests

Joan 6

Joan6 is a webpage meant to be displayed on a tablet in front of a room. Navigate to https://hacklabbooking.utm.utoronto.ca/joan/<ROOM> to see the joan6 view.

The Joan naming scheme is kept for historical reasons.