Pluto Start

What is it?

Pluto-start provides the user interface for the "home page" and also provides the oauth flow for user authentication. It's a frontend-only project that is built into Javascript from Typescript (mostly!) and is served via an nginx pod.

Note that the top banner and menu bar, as well as parts of the login UI, are provided by the pluto-headers package: https://gitlab.com/codmill/customer-projects/guardian/pluto-headers.

What is menuvalidator?

menu-validator is a small commandline program that checks both the syntax and schema of a json menu definition file. It's used on the docker image at startup; the menu that is presented by pluto-headers is dynamically loaded from a json file provided by pluto-start. In production this json file is, in turn, provided by configuration in Kubernetes.

If there was no validation, than a small schema error would break the entire UI for every component. Therefore, we validate the provided menu at startup and refuse to run if there is a problem. Therefore any pod rollout will "stick" and prompt operator intervention.

Why is it written in Go? Because it's small and simple.

What is keysync?

keysync is a small Docker image containing jq and curl. It's used to regularly sync the JWKS signing keys from an external OAuth provider so we don't need to hit an external endpoint every time we validate.

Prerequisites

• Node.js environment, preferably v16. v17 is known to fail on the current version of Webpack. We use nvm to manage node versions.
• Go development environment, as recent as possible. You can download this from https://go.dev/dl/.
• (Optional) GNU make to bring everything together

Development (via prexit-local)

0. If you have not done so already, get prexit-local from https://gitlab.com/codmill/customer-projects/guardian/prexit-local and follow the instructions there to install it.

You'll need to make sure that you have Keycloak correctly set up and have the signing key in order to be able to meaningfully test pluto-start

1. Once you have followed the prexit-local instructions and been able to log in, you should see the pluto-start UI immediately.

2. Ensure you are building on a recent Node.js version, but not too recent (webpack seems to fail on node 17). We use node16 through nvm usually.

3. Ensure you have run eval $(minikube docker-env) so that Docker images get built into the prexit-local environment.

4. Run make clean && make in the root directory to build a dev version of the frontend into a Docker image. You can also run make distclean to remove node_modules etc. as well.

5. Either manually delete the currently running pluto-start pod or use the one-liner:

kubectl delete pod $(kubectl get pods | grep pluto-start | awk '{print $1}')

to do it automatically