URM: Unified Repository Manager

URM is a reinvented wheel for simple repository / inventory management. Originally designed for asset management in small laboratories, URM provides a light-weight and straightforward way to manage things without the burden put by enterprise-class inventory management systems.

Design

The "Unified" in the name "URM" means that the user interfaces (UIs) and the application programming interfaces (APIs) are combined together, and can be accessed at the same location (URL). The presented web page is simply a kind of presentation of data which is human-readable, while the APIs present data which is machine-readable.

Technically, this is simple to achieve. The server inspects the Accept HTTP header sent by HTTP clients, and send responses in differnet formats (Content-Types) according to it:

• If Accept: text/html, then Content-Type: text/html. Typically, browsers automatically send this Accept header.
• If Accept: application/json, then Content-Type: application/json.
  • This is also the default behavior: if the Accept header is not specified, or it's Accept: */* (this is typically sent by cURL), then JSON is also returned.

This is perhaps useless, but whatever.

Use

The tarball containing the binary release consists of a single directory called urm/, where the main executable of URM named urm is located. There is another executable named genuser, which is used for generating a user entry ready for inserting into the corresponding MongoDB collection (table).

Before running URM, you may want to adjust some settings to suit your environment:

• To configure the serving behavior of URM, Rocket.toml needs to be tweaked. Consult this documentation for how to configure the server, e.g. the listening address and port.
• To configure URM per se, edit urm.toml; URM reads urm.toml in its running directory. The provided urm.toml is an example configuration file with comments, where all options have defaults and are optional. Read it and know what can be configured!

MongoDB should already be running. After the MongoDB daemon (mongod) starts, you need to use the provided genuser program to generate users that are permitted to edit the database:

# Usage: ./genuser <username> <password>
$ ./genuser urm mru
{"username":"urm","password":"...a long long string..."}

Assuming that you do not edit the options in the [collection] table in urm.toml, the output should be directly inserted into the users collection:

> use urm
switched to db urm
> db.users.insert({"username":"urm","password":"...a long long string..."})
WriteResult({ "nInserted" : 1 })

Finally, launch URM by simply invoking ./urm.

Build

This project depends on Rocket, which is a powerful but simple web framework for Rust. Since Rocket requires Rust nightly, a nightly version of the Rust compiler is required to compile this project. If you don't already have the Rust compiler installed, use Rustup.

After you have the nightly Rust toolchain set up, invoke cargo build to build this project in debug mode, or cargo run to directly run the project compiled in debug mode. Release mode can be toggled with the option --release.

cargo build             # Build the project in debug mode
# cargo build --release # Build the project in release mode

cargo run               # Run the project compiled in debug mode
# cargo run --release   # Run the project compiled in release mode

A full list of dependencies that URM is relying on can be viewed at Cargo.toml.

License

This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See COPYING for details.