CHES Backend
CHES (Common Hosted Email Service) Backend is a simple node.js wrapper around the BC Gov. Common Hosted Email Service. The wrapper is a simple pass through to the service, its main purpose is to hide the service client credentials from the frontend.
Configuration
The CHES Backend will require some configuration, namely credentials to CHES and where to call CHES. We also want to lock down our api using a JWT Token for MSSC. We will need to configure our ches-backend to authenticate using the same KeyCloak realm and client as the frontend uses.
We are using the npm library: config, to configure our application. We can either set environment variables to be picked up by custom-environment-variables.json or we can create a local configuration file (do not check into source control) such as local.json. Please read the config library documentation to see how it overlays various environment files and uses environment variables to override those values (when provided).
Environment Variables
| Name | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CHES_CLIENT_ID | MSSC_SERVICE_CLIENT | The name of the service client in the realm that has been granted access to CHES. See GetOK for more information |
| CHES_CLIENT_SECRET | The service client’s password | |
| CHES_TOKEN_URL | The OpenID token url to authenticate this client | |
| CHES_API_URL | The CHES url | |
| SERVER_HOST_URL | http://localhost:8888 | The domain/base url where we will expose the api. |
| SERVER_PORT | 8888 | port for node to listen on. |
| SERVER_BODYLIMIT | 30mb | Set the allowed request body size (will include encoded attachments). See body-parser limit and bytes lib |
| SERVER_LOGLEVEL | info | set the npm log level (verbose, debug, info, warn, error). |
| SERVER_MORGANFORMAT | dev | set the logging format for Morgan. |
| KC_CLIENTID | mssc | The name of the frontend authorization service client - Users login to this (KeyCloak) client to get authenticated and authorized to MSSC. See GetOK for more information |
| KC_CLIENTSECRET | The KeyCloak service client’s password | |
| KC_REALM | 98r0z7rz | The KeyCloak realm id |
| KC_SERVERURL | https://dev.oidc.gov.bc.ca/auth | The KeyCloak authorization url |