Taskboard

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⚠️ Obsolete ⚠️

I used this project to learn about Rust and Kubernetes, but I have (per 2023) not been updating it in a while, so many of the tools are now out of date or no longer best-practice. I have decomissioned the related cloud resources for running this page (meaning the URL's no longer work) and archived the git repository for now.

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A Kanban inspired board for managing tasks/todo's and tracking progress.

Visit https://www.taskboard.cloud to try it out!

This application is mostly a proof-of-concept of full-stack development with Rust. It's also my personal playground for testing out web development with rust, and kubernetes, and elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch might be a weird choice for persisting data. I chose it to learn more about it.

Architecture Overview

Here's a high level overview of the different exposed services:

graph TD
    subgraph kubernetes
    I(ingress-nginx) ---> APP(taskboard app<br/>www.taskboard.cloud)
    I ---> P(project service<br/>api.taskboard.cloud/project)
    I ---> T(task service<br/>api.taskboard.cloud/task)
    I ----> M(linkerd dashboard<br/>metrics.taskboard.cloud)
    I ----> K(kibana<br/>logs.taskboard.cloud)
end

Elasticsearch is used for persisting application data and logs.

Metrics, Logs and Monitoring

Basic health info is available at www.taskboard.cloud/healthz.

More detailed metrics are available on metrics.taskboard.cloud, and logs are available through kibana on logs.taskboard.cloud. These are password protected. Let me know if you need would like access.

Note that I'm running all of this on a single-node cheap-ish AKS cluster. Thus there might be some unreliability, especially when I try out something new.

Development

Prerequisites

• Docker >= v20.10 and preferably docker-compose

  • To use older versions of docker you'll need to add this to the top of the Dockerfiles

    # syntax = docker/dockerfile:1-experimental

• Enable BuildKit for docker and docker-compose. This is not required, but recommended because it significantly speeds up subsequent builds due to caching.

  export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1
  export COMPOSE_DOCKER_CLI_BUILD=1

Run the code

docker-compose up -d --build

Likely issues when running locally

Port 80 not available

docker-compose.yaml maps the nginx container serving the front-end app to http://localhost

ports:
  - "80:80"

This will fail if you already have something running on port 80. Feel free to change it to something else.

Front-end app not updating

It's probably cached in the browser. Disable cache or hard-reload (control-shift-r in chrome). The problem is mitigated for CI builds by appending the (short) commit hash to the file names.

Creating projects and tasks fails when low disk-space available

Your local elasticsearch cluster becomes read-only if you're low on disk space. This makes creating tasks and projects fail. The elasticsearch container will emit logs similar to this.

{
  "type": "server",
  "level": "WARN",
  "component": "o.e.c.r.a.DiskThresholdMonitor",
  "cluster.name": "docker-cluster",
  "message": "flood stage disk watermark [95%] exceeded on [OZOgTVsrTlerKqoChHnhYw][3d7d5a8abd03][/usr/share/elasticsearch/data/nodes/0] free: 2.1gb[3%], all indices on this node will be marked read-only"
}

In my experience it was caused by docker images and build cache filling up my root partition. These commands should help free up some space:

docker system df           # check how much space docker is taking
docker image prune -a      # remove all unused images
docker builder prune       # remove dangling build cache