Crash Stats Webapp¶

Code is in webapp/.

Run script is /app/bin/run_webapp.sh.

Configuration¶

FIXME

Running in a local dev environment¶

To run the webapp, do:

$ docker compose up webapp

To ease debugging, you can run a shell in the container:

$ docker compose run --service-ports webapp shell

Then you can start and stop the webapp, adjust files, and debug.

If you want to do anything in the webapp admin, you’ll need to create a superuser in the Crash Stats webapp and a OIDC account to authenticate against in the oidcprovider service container.

Let’s use these credentials:

username: willkg
password: foo
email: willkg@example.com

This creates an account in the oidcprovider service container:

$ docker compose up -d oidcprovider
$ docker compose exec oidcprovider /code/manage.py createuser willkg foo willkg@example.com

This creates a superuser account in the Crash Stats webapp corresponding to the account we created in the oidcprovider service container:

$ docker compose run app shell ./webapp/manage.py makesuperuser willkg@example.com

Feel free to use different credentials.

Note

You will have to recreate both of these accounts any time you do something that recreates the postgres db or restarts the oidcprovider service container.

Best to put account creationg in a shell script so you can recreate both accounts easily.

Permissions¶

The webapp uses Django’s groups and permissions to define access groups for sensitive data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). There are three main classes of users:

Anonymous visitors and basic users do not have access to memory dumps or PII.
Users in the “Hackers” group can view memory dumps and PII. Memory Dump Access has the details for requesting access to this group.
Superusers maintain the site, set group membership in the Django admin, and have full access.

A logged-in user can view their detailed permissions on the Your Permissions page.

The groups and their permissions are defined in webapp/crashstats/crashstats/signals.py. These are applied to the database in a “post-migrate” signal handler.

Static Assets¶

In the development environment, the STATIC_ROOT is set to /tmp/crashstats-static/ rather than /app/webapp/static. The process in the container creates files with the uid 10001, and Linux users will have permissions-related problems if these are mounted on the host computer.

The problem this creates is that /tmp/crashstats-static/ is ephemeral and any changes there disappear when you stop the container.

If you are on macOS or Windows, then Docker uses a shared file system that creates files with your user ID. This makes it safe to persist static assets, at the cost of slower file system performance. Linux users can manually set the uid and gid to match their account, for the same effect. See “Set UID and GID for Docker container user” in Setup quickstart.

If you want static assets to persist between container restarts, then you can override STATIC_ROOT in my.env to return it to the app folder:

STATIC_ROOT=/app/static

Alternatively, you can mount /tmp/crashstats-static/ using volumes in a docker compose.override.yml file:

version: "2"
services:
  webapp:
    volumes:
      # Persist the static files folder
      - ./static:/tmp/crashstats-static

Production-style Assets¶

When you run docker compose up webapp in the local development environment, it starts the web app using Django’s runserver command. DEBUG=True is set in the docker/config/local_dev.env file, so static assets are automatically served from within the individual Django apps rather than serving the minified and concatenated static assets you’d get in a production-like environment.

If you want to run the web app in a more “prod-like manner”, you want to run the webapp using gunicorn and with DEBUG=False. Here’s how you do that.

First start a bash shell with service ports:

$ docker compose run --service-ports webapp shell

Then compile the static assets:

app@socorro:/app$ cd webapp/
app@socorro:/app/webapp$ ./manage.py collectstatic --noinput
app@socorro:/app/webapp$ cd ..

Now run the webapp with gunicorn and DEBUG=False:

app@socorro:/app$ DEBUG=False bash bin/run_webapp.sh

You will now be able to open http://localhost:8000 on the host and if you view the source you see that the minified and concatenated static assets are served instead.

Because static assets are compiled, if you change JS or CSS files, you’ll need to re-run ./manage.py collectstatic.

Running in a server environment¶

Add configuration to webapp.env file.

Run the docker image using the webapp command. Something like this:

docker run \
    --env-file=webapp.env \
    mozilla/socorro_app webapp