DBG Schedule Sync

A web service to sync the representation plan of the school DBG Metzingen, which is hosted on DSBmobile, to Google Calendar. It is built using Firebase. For mailing, AWS SES is used.

Only the changes which are relevant to the individual student get synced to their calendar. A separate secondary calendar gets created for the plan, which then looks something like the image below. At the start of the new school year, all active users receive an email, reminding them to adjust their settings to their new schedule accordingly.

The web app running in production can be found on dbg-vertretung.stubit.tv.

Deployment

Before the service can be deployed successfully, config files and environment variables need to be added.

Frontend

The Firebase SDK configuration can be configured via environment variables with a nearly identical name. Remember that it is possible to create a .env-file to set them only once.

JSON field name	Environment variable
apiKey	VUE_APP_API_KEY
authDomain	VUE_APP_DOMAIN
authDomain	VUE_APP_ALT_DOMAIN In case your website can be reached from another domain. If not, it should be set identically to the previous.
databaseURL	VUE_APP_DATABASE_URL
projectId	VUE_APP_PROJECT_ID
storageBucket	VUE_APP_STORAGE_BUCKET
messagingSenderId	VUE_APP_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID
appId	VUE_APP_APP_ID
measurementId	VUE_APP_MEASUREMENT_ID

The Google-OAuth client ID can be set via the VUE_APP_GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID environment variable. In addition, to get verified by Google to use it in production, add your privacy notice PDF as public/privacy.pdf.

To verify your website for Google Search indexing, you can set the verification code via GOOGLE_VERIFICATION_ID_ONE,
and for the second domain via GOOGLE_VERIFICATION_ID_TWO.

The social media preview image URL, which will show the chosen image when your website is linked, can be set via PREVIEW_IMAGE.

Backend

All required config files need to be at the root of the functions-directory. In addition, the appropriate accounts need to be created for the cloud services.

The sign-in process needs the same Firebase SDK configuration as the frontend but in a less modified form. Create web_client.json, in which you copy your configuration, and change to formatting to be proper JSON. The field names stay unmodified. It should look like this:

{
  "apiKey": "",
  "appId": "",
  "authDomain": "",
  "databaseURL": "",
  "measurementId": "",
  "messagingSenderId": "",
  "projectId": "",
  "storageBucket": ""
}

Download your OAuth client configuration to complete the sign-up process as JSON and save it as oauth_client.json.

Download your service account credentials to access the Google Calendar API and Firebase as JSON and save it as service_account.json.

The rest of the configuration is done via the Firebase environment configuration. The keys are as follows:

Configuration key	Description
aws.email.debug_addresses	Email addresses which will receive emails while debugging.
aws.email.templates.permissions	Email template name, which informs the user about missing calendar access permissions.
aws.email.templates.new_year_reminder	Email template name, which reminds the user to adjust their settings for the new year.
aws.email.source_address	Email addresses to send emails from.
aws.region	AWS service region.
aws.key_id	AWS service account key ID.
aws.access_key	AWS service account access key. Should be replaced by the Google Cloud Secret Manger.
web_app.address	URL to your web app that will be added to the calendar description.
dsb.password	DSB password. Should be replaced by the Google Cloud Secret Manger.
dsb.user	DSB username.