Help Desk Core

Help Desk Core is an issues management application built with an Angular (v5.2.1) frontend and ASP.NET Core 2.0. Its goal is to provide the staff of corporate businesses with an issue reporting and tracking tool that they could use in their daily work.

Development Environment

• Sql Server Express 2017 & Sql Server Management Studio 2017
• Runs in both Visual Studio 2017 & Visual Studio Code
• Node 8.11.1 & NPM 5.6.0
• .NET Core 2.0 sdk
• Angular CLI -> npm install -g @angular/cli https://github.com/angular/angular-cli

Setup

To build and run the project using the command line:

git clone https://github.com/bigabdoul/helpdeskcore.git
git clone https://github.com/bigabdoul/efcore-repository.git
git clone https://github.com/bigabdoul/coretools.git
git clone https://github.com/bigabdoul/mailkit-tools.git
cd helpdeskcore/src
npm install
dotnet restore
dotnet ef database update
dotnet run

Database setup

To get the database up and running in the development environment, there's nothing else to do after running the Entity Framework migrations dotnet ef database update.

Configuration settings and sections

When deploying to production, you will have to generate the SQL scripts from the updated database and edit the src/appsettings.json file accordingly.

1. ConnectionStrings: Change the DefaultConnection property to a valid connection string.

2. IdentityInitializerSettings: Pay special attention to this configuration section. You must change the AdminId property to a new GUID and the other properties of that section: AdminEmail, AdminUserName, AdminPassword. Change them to your liking. I recommend editing this section BEFORE navigating to the application's launch URL (http://localhost:5000 in dev mode) because it seeds the database with these settings. In other words, we use these settings to create the application's built-in (super) administrator. You must change the password after the first time login. Unfortunately, this feature (change password) hasn't been implemented yet as of this writing.

3. JwtIssuerOptions: The Audience property, which defaults to http://localhost:5000, needs to be changed to the hostname of the deployed application; otherwise, API calls coming from other URLs will fail. At the same time you should make the same changes to the src/src/environments/environment.prod.ts file like so: export const environment = { production: true, baseUrl: 'http://example.com/api' };

4. FacebookAuthSettings: If you'd like to allow users to authenticate on the site via Facebook, then you'll have to set the appropriate AppId and AppSecret accordingly. The default AppId and AppSecret are the same as in this project.

5. SecurityKey: Update this configuration setting to something else, unique and complex. It's used in Startup.cs to initialize an instance of the SymmetricSecurityKey class, which, in turn, we used to configure the JwtIssuerOptions.SigningCredentials property.

Deployment

Deployment on Windows with IIS

Supported operating systems

Deploying an ASP.NET Core application is supported only on Windows 7 or later, and Windows Server 2008 R2 or later.

Step by step instructions

1. Make sure to install the web server features. Read this article for detailed instructions.

2. Install the .NET Core Hosting Bundle.

3. Download and install the .NET Core 2.0 Runtime (v2.0.8). Installing the .NET Core 2.1 Runtime will break the application because of a regression bug in the latter.

   Here are some quick links for different architectures:

   • x64 Installer (To prevent the installer from installing x86 packages on an x64 OS, run the installer from an administrator command prompt with the switch OPT_NO_X86=1 e.g. DotNetCore.2.0.8-WindowsHosting.exe /OPT_NO_X86=1)
   • x86 Installer

4. Create the IIS site (i.e., HelpDeskCore). Troubles come when configuring the access rights to the folder that contains the application files. You merely have to deal with the Application Pool Identity permissions. The easiest way to avoid trouble is to use an administrative user account, explicitly picking up a user and setting the appropriate password. Check out this article for a better approach. In the context of an ASP.NET Core application deployment on Windows, try the following:

$Path = "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\helpdeskcore"  
$User = "IIS AppPool\HelpDeskCore"  
$Acl = Get-Acl $Path  
$Ar = New-Object  system.security.accesscontrol.filesystemaccessrule($User,"FullControl", "ContainerInherit,ObjectInherit", "None", "Allow")  
$Acl.SetAccessRule($Ar)  
Set-Acl $Path $Acl  

Of course, the above parameters need to be replaced with those you've actually used.

Deployment on Linux

There are different versions of Linux that support the .NET Core 2.0 Runtime (v2.0.8) and installation instructions are available for the most popular distributions of it:

• RHEL
• Ubuntu 18.04
• Ubuntu 17.10
• Ubuntu 16.04
• Ubuntu 14.04
• Debian 9
• Debian 8
• Fedora 26
• Fedora 25
• CentOS / Oracle
• openSUSE
• SLES