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Parsec Server installation

This guide covers the installation procedure for the Parsec server (also called parsec-backend).

Requirements

Preamble

The Parsec server depends on the following external components in order to work properly:

Warning

For security reasons, the installation of these components is outside the scope of this guide. In order to securely configure and manage them, please refer to their official documentations.

This guide provides instructions for quickly settings up mock-ups or basic installs of those components. Keep in mind that these instructions are provided for convenience and should not be used in production.

Parsec testing infra

Generating the required TLS certificates

For this guide, the required TLS certificates will be generated with a custom Certificate Authority (CA) created for this purpose.

setup-tls.sh

The script will:

  1. Generate the CA key & self-signed certificate (custom-ca.{key,crt}).
  2. For parsec-s3 and parsec-backend services:
    1. Generate the service key & Certificate Signing Request (CSR) parsec-{service}.{key,csr}.
    2. Generate the certificate using the CSR and the CA.

  3. For the service parsec-backend:

    1. Change the group id of the key file to 1234 (That is the GID used by the parsec-server container).
    2. Change the file mode to give read permission to the group 1234.

    Note

    This is required because docker-compose does not allow to mount the file with the correct permissions in the container.

Warning

For production, you should use certificates issued from a trusted CA

The env files

We split the configuration of the parsec server into multiple env files so it's simpler to understand how to configure each part.

The administration token

To be able to perform admin tasks (like creating an organization) on the backend, an administration token is required. Below you will find a simple script to generate a token:

gen-admin-token.sh

The script will generate a random token (openssl rand 63 | base64 --wrap=86) and create the env file parsec-admin-token.env

Note

The step TOKEN=$(openssl rand 63 | base64 --wrap=86) could also be replaced by a value generated by a password-generator for example.

It doesn't need to be encoded in base64 (we encode it in the script just to have printable characters).

Database configuration

Create the file parsec-db.env with the following content to configure the access to the PostgreSQL database:

parsec-db.env

SMTP configuration

Create the file parsec-smtp.env to configure the access to the SMTP server (mailhog in this case).

We need to set the connection informations, the sender information, in which the default language the emails are sent:

parsec-smtp.env

S3 service configuration

Create the file parsec-s3.env with the following content to set the URL for the S3-like service:

parsec-s3.env

Note

We need to escape the : with a \ when specifying the port of the service.

Parsec server configuration

Create the file parsec.env with the following content to configure the parsec-backend service:

parsec.env

The docker-compose file

You can use the following docker-compose file (parsec-server.docker.yaml) to deploy the Parsec server for testing:

parsec-server.docker.yaml

It will setup 4 services:

Service name Description
parsec-postgres The PostgreSQL database
parsec-s3 The Object Storage service
parsec-smtp A mock SMTP server
parsec-backend The Parsec server

Starting the services

The docker containers can be started as follow:

docker compose -f parsec-server.docker.yaml up

Initial configuration

On the first start, a one-time configuration is required for the database and s3 services.

Applying the database migration

(optional) Check that the database is accessible with:

set -a
source parsec-db.env
docker exec -t parsec-postgres psql 'postgresql://DB_USER:DB_PASS@0.0.0.0:5432/parsec' -c "\conninfo"

Note

You should have something like display on your console:

You are connected to database "parsec" as user "parsec" on host "0.0.0.0" at port "5432".

To bootstrap the database we just need to apply the migrations with:

docker compose -f parsec-server.docker.yaml run parsec-backend migrate

Create the S3 Bucket

Access the console at https://127.0.0.1:9090, you will need to use the credential specified in the docker-compose file at services.parsec-s3.environment.MINIO_ROOT_{USER,PASSWORD}.

Go to https://127.0.0.1:9090/buckets/add-bucket to create a new bucket named parsec with the features object locking toggled on.

After that you will need to restart the parsec-backend (that likely exited because it wasn't able to access the S3 bucket):

docker compose -f parsec-server.docker.yaml restart parsec-backend

Test the SMTP configuration & server

You can test mailhog with:

ping-mailhog.sh

You can then check if the email is present in the web interface at http://127.0.0.1:8025

Start using Parsec server

Create the first organization

set -a
source parsec-admin-token.env
export SSL_CAFILE=$PWD/custom-ca.crt
parsec.cli core create_organization --addr parsec://127.0.0.1:6777 <orgname>

Note

Change <orgname> to the organization's name that suit you.

Save the link after Bootstrap organization url: you will need it to create the first user (owner) of the organization.

Add the first user to the organization

First, start parsec with the custom CA:

export SSL_CAFILE=$PWD/custom-ca.crt
parsec

After that go to Menu/Join an organization (or CTRL+O) and paste the link from before (should already be filled in the text field). Follow the instructions to create the first user of the organization.