Vent

This is a project designed for managing events with 2 classes of people - those who can only attend, and those can both attend and supervise - and these are refered to as participants and prefects respectively. Anyone with the IP/Domain can view this server and edit the events, and it also publishes an endpoint to update an ICS subscription.

This was originally engineered as a replacement to a brittle spreadsheet that didn't track photos or participants - participants were manually added to a separate spreadsheet, and photos were inconsistently named in a OneDrive folder.

Setup/Installation

Requirements

This project requires:

• cargo and the other rust build tools like a valid C++ compiler
• sqlx-cli installed via cargo - this is used for postgres migrations. This project currently uses the latest version.
• devenv or docker compose - this is used for the postgres server. docker is reccomended, and can be installed through the docs.
• libssl-dev - this is used for the axum server
• clang - this is used for the spreadsheet export

Environment

You need to have a .env file with the following variables set:

Mandatory

Name	Use	Example Contents
VENT_SERVER_IP	This is the IP the server should serve to	127.0.0.1:8080
DATABASE_URL	This is used for the postgres database	postgres://user@127.0.0.1:1111/user
CFT_SITEKEY	This is the Sitekey for Cloudflare Turnstile	0x4AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
CFT_SECRETKEY	This is the secret key for Cloudflare Turnstile	0x4AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAB

Optional

Name	Use	Example Contents	Default
RUST_LOG	Logging	ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, or TRACE. For more examples, see the docs.	No logging
CONFIG_LOCATION	The file path to your condiguration file for below.	./cfg.ron	./config/local.toml
HONEYCOMB_API_KEY	This is the Honeycomb destination	abcdefghijklmopqrstuvwxyz	N/A
SENTRY_DSN	This is the Sentry destination	https://abc.ingest.sentry.io/123	N/A

Configuration

You should also have a configuration file (JSON, TOML, YAML, INI, RON, JSON5 all supported) that follows the following schema:

niche: {
    date_time_format: String,
    tech_support: Url,
},
brand: {
    instance_name: String,
    domain: String,
},
mail: {
    username: String,
    password: String,
    smtp: String,
    username_domain: String,
},
timezone_id: String

Name	Use	Example Contents
niche.date_time_format	For formatting dates in the UI - appropriate format specifiers	"%c"
niche.tech_support	For where user should be directed with 500-class errors.	"https://github.com/yourname/yourfork/issues/new"
brand.instance_name	For the name of the application in the UI."House Events Manager"	House Events Manager
brand.domain	The domain of the website - used for absolute links	http://localhost
mail.username	This is the username for the mail account that will send password set links.	noreply.vent@gmail.com
mail.password	This is the password for the mail account.	aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab
mail.smtp	This is the SMTP server for the mail account.	smtp.zoho.eu
mail.username_domain	This is the domain that users are registered under to send emails to.	gmail.com
timezone_id	This is the TZID for the calendar events.	Europe/London
tech_support_person	This is the name of the person to contact for password resets and will be listed on the login page.	Alice Bartholomew (Alice.B@domain.com)

Setup

I would highly reccomend a tmux based setup to run this without needing an active ssh session to run whilst away.

1. Setup the postgres server - devenv up or docker compose up.
2. Run the postgres migrations - sqlx migrate run
3. Make sure the name of your project is correctly set in the public/manifest.json - this is the one thing I couldn't work out how to set with environment variables. You also need to provide: 256x256.png, 512x512.png and favicon.ico.
4. Run the binary - cargo r --release for production, or cargo r for development. In production to minimise downtime, I use cargo b rather than cargo r to quickly stop the old binary and launch into the new one without recompiling. 5Enjoy!

Reccomendations

I currently run this through Caddy as a reverse proxy to get HTTPS certificates via Let's Encrypt!. These are the contents of the Caddyfile on the server that this runs on, redacted appropriately. This just runs via the default systemd service which takes the config from /etc/caddy/Caddyfile:

{
    email EMAIL_ADDRESS #eg. a@b.com
}

# Refer to the Caddy docs for more information:
# https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile

FULL_DOMAIN { #eg. vent.your.domain
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080 # make sure this is set to a localhost address, and NOT your server's external IP
}

Architecture

The project consists of an axum app, which serves liquid templates all based off data from a postgres database accessed via sqlx.

Contributing

I'm not sure why you would, but I'll happily review any PRs/Issues that arise, but beware that this is a side project so I may be unable to look at them quickly.