Simple Forum SPA

This is a simple Forum ASP .NET MVC Core SPA Web App written to play around with IdentityServer4. Particularly, making the native ASP.NET Core Identity system play along with the IdentityServer4 STS hosted in a separate service, and making it all work with an Angular SPA client app all together.

Overview

The forum allows to create/modify/delete threads and ceate replies to threads depending on user's role. There're three user roles: user, moderator, admin.

Note: there's no guest role, so users that are not logged-in can't see forum threads at all.

Role	Read	Edit	Delete	Reply
guest	NO	NO	NO	NO
user	YES	NO	NO	YES
moderator	YES	YES	NO	YES
admin	YES	YES	YES	YES

The solution consists of 3 services:

• WebSPA - A SPA app written in angular.
• Api.Auth - An ASP .NET webservice responsible for authentication/authorization. Uses IdenttityServer4 to issue/verify JWT tokens. Has Login/Register web forms (Razor). Also has a REST service to give away the list of all users and their roles to be deisplayed in WebSPA.
• Api.Forum - A WebApi with CRUD to manage threads/replies. The access to the API is regulated by roles.

And stores logs aggregated from services/containers into ElasticSearch:

• Elasticsearch container
• Kibana + LogTrail

Api.Auth and Api.Forum create their own databases in a local MS SQL Server DBMS instance. SimpleForum-Api.Auth-v1 and SimpleForum-Api.Forum-v1 correspondingly.

Service	Binding	In Docker
WebSPA	http://localhost:5001	http://WebSPA:5001
Api.Auth	http://localhost:5002	http://api.auth:5002
Api.Forum	http://localhost:5003	http://api.forum:5003
sql.server	(localdb)	test.sql.server,1433
elastic	http://localhost:9200	http://elk_elastic:9200
kibana	http://localhost:5601	http://elk_kibana:5601

When running on host machine it will use the local LocalDB instance. And when in Docker, it will utilize a separate mssql-server-linux container.

Note: ElasticSearch and Kibana containers take a long time to start. Other (forum) containers are not waiting for them.

Disclaimer

This project is a sole playground which is not intended to be published anywhere. So, not the SPA part nor the .NET code contain proper configuration to be built for production. Even the docker containers that run the services are based on dotnet:2.1-sdk which is not intended for any kind of production. Also, there is no token expiration/renewal handling.

Prerequisites

• Docker for Windows
• ASP .NET Core SDK 2.1.300
• Node.Js
• LocalDB

Known Issues

• angular2-logger problem when building with Angular5. Fix is to delete ts files from npm package

ERROR in ./node_modules/angular2-logger/app/core/level.ts
Module build failed: Error: xyz\node_modules\angular2-logger\app\core\level.ts is missing from the TypeScript compilation. Please make sure it is in your tsconfig via the 'files' or 'include' property.
The missing file seems to be part of a third party library. TS files in published libraries are often a sign of a badly packaged library. Please open an issue in the library repository to alert its author and ask them to package the library using the Angular Package Format (https://goo.gl/jB3GVv).

• Nevermind the errors like these. These are actually npm warnings that .net wrongfully displays as errors.

 [Error] Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices
         on line 10 of node_modules/bootstrap/scss/mixins/_text-hide.scss, in mixin `text-hide`

Preview

Usage

From console

.\StartAll.ps1

This will spawn three new console procesess each running an instance of a microservice (Api.Auth, Api.Forum and WebSpa) hosted in Kastrel (withouth integration with IIS).

Note: when running on the host windows system SimpleForum will use a local instance of LocalDB. See connection strings.

From Docker

Switch into the Linux mode. From the solution's root folder execute:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up 

And open http://localhost:5001 in your browser.

Note1: Even when running in docker, it will expose services to localhost, so ports 5001-5003 are expected to be vacant on the host machine.

Note2: Even thouth the soulution utilizes Docker, the containers themselves has nothing to do with deployment. It's only a playground.

From Visual Studio 15

• By activating the "Multiple Startup Projects" option in the solution's properties.
• Starting the docker-compose project.

Angular-cli

It is possible to run SPA part outside the dotnet host (without running WebSPA.csproj). For that simply:

cd .\WebSPA\ClientApp

npm install copyfiles -g
npm install -g @angular/cli

npm ng:prestart
npm ng:start

Note: You need the latest version of nodeJS installed on your machine in order to use npm.

LogTrail

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.