Congress - The LoRa backend server

Features

• Supports LoRaWAN 1.1
• PostgreSQL or in-memory database
• OAuth integration with Telenor CONNECT
• Token-based API access
• Monitoring via separate endpoint
• REST API to manage applications, gateways and devices
• Websocket, MQTT, AWS IOT outputs
• Gateway interface with the reference packet forwarder from Semtech.

Not-features

Not-features (ie features not implemented yet)

• No support for frequencies outside EU868. Additional frequencies are relatively simple to implement
• No ADR support (yet)
• Limited frequency management
• Custom frequency plans for gateways.
• Redundancy for instances. There's only one server and if you plan to run this in a production environment it is highly recommended to implement some sort of failover, either by using Nginx or through another kind of load balancer.

Deploying Congress

You can run Congress either as a standalone server locally, in Docker containers or in AWS.

Running a standalone process

There are several command line options. List them with ./congress -help. In short: If you want to launch a simple server lauch it with ./congress --disable-auth. This will bring up a server with no authentication, logging to stderr, memory-backed storage and a minimum configuration. If you want to persist data between launches use a PostgreSQL database. Get the script by running ./congress -printschema.

Running via Docker

A Docker-compose configuration file can be found in deployment/docker. More details can be found in the README.

Testing tools

We've made a few tools that can be used when testing Congress:

• Eagle One - emulates a packet forwarder that can run in both interactive and batch mode. The batch mode creates a fixed number of devices, sends messages and removes the devices afterwards. In interactive mode you can create individual devices and send specific messages.
• Datagenerator - generates data for your backend. The tool uses a direct PostgreSQL database connection to create data.

Let's Encrypt certificates

The server supports Let's Encrypt certificates out of the box. Configure the certificates with the parameters acme-cert, acme-hostname and acme-secret-dir.

Note that the hostname must be reachable from the internet, ie the server has to be running on its own domain.

The acme-secret-dir is the directory where the private key for the certificate will be cached.

AMQP support

The AMQP support uses the CGo bindings to the Apache Qpid library. Set the build tag amqp to enable the output (ie build with go build -tags amqp)