MentorBank

This repository contains the entire codebase for the frontend, the backend and database schemas/initial-data of the mentoring platform, MentorBank, made by Group22 as a CS261 group work.

Group Members (sorted alphabetically):

• David Jackman
• Henry Ha
• Kiran Sanganee
• Manan Patel
• Moody Liu
• Varun Chodanker
• Xieyu Wang Lin

1. Details

a. File Structure

The main file is docker-compose.yml, where all components of the MentorBank are defined, majorly 3 submodules, backend, database and frontend. These correspond to the actural project structure.

In the dockerfiles/ there are several docker configuration files, they are Docker configurations for each containers.

In examples/, there is one nginx-reverse-proxy-tls.conf demonstrating how to configure Nginx TLS reverse proxy to secure your installation.

b. Network Organisation and Interconnection

The backend has been splitted up to 4 micro services and 2 cron-based instances, each running independently in its own container, each of the 4 backend containers is connected to two different networks:

1. mentorbank-network: Network between backend gRPC server to the frontend Node.JS server.
2. mentorbank-db-network: Network between backend gRPC server to the database.

Within one network, containers are able to communicate with each other, so two networks are separated to ensure an enhanced security, preventing illicit access to the database from the frontend side.

The rest 2 cron-based instances are only connected to the mentorbank-db-network, because their functionality is to maintain database state thus there's nothing to do with the front-end.

2. Dependencies

• Docker
• docker-compose

3. Configuration and Usage

The code is self-contained, by using correct docker commands it will download required libraries and setup runtime environment automatically.

1. Open docker-compose.yml and change corresponding fields:

   • Change NEXTAUTH_URL to your hosting URL

   • Change JWT_SECRET, NEXTAUTH_SECRET and API_SECRET_KEY to randomly generated strings.

     You can generate one using openssl rand -hex 32

2. To make sure the permission is correct, you should run chmod a+r ./database/*.sql if these files are not global-readable.

3. Run docker-compose build in the repository root directory, to build the containers.

4. Run docker-compose up to start the containers for the first time.

   Note: When it's the first time to start the container, the database container will do initialisation, causing backend failures when they're trying to connect to the DB at this time, producing error messages.

   This is fine for the first time startup, the gRPC backend containers will restart every 5 seconds if they fail, reconnect to DB.

5. The website is now accessible via http://localhost:9000/. To configure TLS for secure connections you'll need a reverse proxy engine, which could be Nginx, Apache, Caddy or any web server which supports this.

   There has been an example Nginx configuration file in example/.