egt-backend

General backend for process automation and awesome features powered by strapi using discordjs and easyVerein.
This node application will automate and handle different tasks in our daily org processes.

Even if it's a Strapi CMS, we yet don't use any controllers or models, but we use mailing and provide a discord bot with it.
Most likeley at some point this repo will replace egt-vereinsbot and all bot features will be included here powered by strapi models and database persistance.

Installation

yarn install

Running the app

# development
yarn development

# production mode
yarn start

Hosting

Dependencies

Node 14, MySQL or MariaDB.
Best hosted with pm2

npm install pm2@latest -g
npm install yarn -g

Installation

yarn install

# Build Admin UI in production mode
NODE_ENV=production yarn build --clean

Setting up database

First set up the database. The database settings and login will be passed as environment variables.

sudo mysql -u root

CREATE DATABASE egt_backend;
CREATE USER 'egt_backend'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secure-password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON egt_backend.* to 'egt_backend'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Setting up the ecosystem.config.js

The ecosystem file is a file gives pm2 all information about the hosted app.
Update the database settings in ecosystem.config.js with the actual values and replace the secret keys by actual secret keys.
You can get some secure keys here but any other secure password strings will do it too.
You also need to pass the tokens for EasyVerein and the discord bot as environment variables.

env: {
  NODE_ENV: 'production',
  DATABASE_USERNAME: 'egt_backend',
  DATABASE_PASSWORD: 'secure-password',
  DATABASE_NAME: 'egt_backend',
  DATABASE_PORT: 3306,
  PORT: 3010,
  SECRET: 'secret-key',
  ADMIN_JWT_SECRET: 'another-secret-key',
  SMTP_HOST: 'mail.foo.tld',
  SMTP_USER: 'smtp-user',
  SMTP_PASS: 'smtp-password',
  ADMIN_MAIL: 'mail.egt.community',
  EASYVEREIN_TOKEN: 'your-easyverein-token',
  BOT_TOKEN: 'your-discord-bot-token',
  ORGA_CHANNEL: 'organisation', // the orga channel name to post some info messages
  GUILD_ID: '282148204999475201', // the ID of the discord server. We don't support multiple servers
},

Setting up the webserver

The node process will run on a specific non-root accessible port, e.g. localhost:3010. This port is defined in the env variable section of the ecosystem.config.js file.
To make the app accessible from the internet, it's the job of a webserver to provide a secure https connection and proxy all requests to the specific port.

Start and manage process with pm2

After you did the installation and configured the ecosystem file, you can start the process with pm2.

pm2 start ecosystem.config.js

You can always check the process with pm2 status, you can stop or start it with pm2 start|stop|restart <processId> and you can see the output of strapi with pm2 log <processId>.
So if the app restarts too often or doesn't start properly, take a look at the log file, normally you'll find the reason there.

Configure strapi

Strapi is a headless cms coming with an admin interface to manage all things.
When Strapi is first run, it will setup all database tables and will allow to set an admin user.
Since this is possible for everyone, after running the process you should hurry to open the admin interface on e.g. https://api.domain.tld/admin and create your first admin user.