Auto Archiver API

A web API that uses celery workers to process URL archive requests via bellingcat/auto-archiver, it allows authentication via Google OAuth Apps and enables CORS, everything runs on docker.

setup

To properly set up the API you need to install docker and to have these files, see more on the sections below:

1. a .env.prod and .env.dev to configure the API, stays at the root level
2. a user-groups.yaml to manage user permissions
3. note that all local files referenced in user-groups.yaml and any orchestration.yaml files should be relative to the home directory so if your service account is in secrets/orchestration.yaml use that path and not just orchestration.yaml.
4. go through the example file and configure it according to your needs.
5. you will need to create and reference at least one secrets/orchestration.yaml file, you can do so by following the instructions in the auto-archiver that automatically generates one for you. If you use the archive sheets feature you will need to create a orchestrationsheets-sheets.yaml file as well that should have the gsheet_feeder and gsheet_db enabled and configured, the auto-archiver has extensive documentation on how to set this up.

Do not commit those files, they are .gitignored by default. We also advise you to keep any sensitive files in the secrets/ folder which is pinned and gitignored.

We have examples for both of those files (.env.example and user-groups.example.yaml), and here's how to set them up whether you're in development or production:

setup for DEVELOPMENT

# copy and modify the .env.dev file according to your needs
cp .env.example .env.dev
# copy the user-groups.example.yaml and modify it accordingly
cp user-groups.example.yaml user-groups.dev.yaml
# run the APP, make sure VPNs are off
make dev
# check it's running by calling the health endpoint
curl 'http://localhost:8004/health'
# > {"status":"ok"}

now go to http://localhost:8004/docs#/ and you should see the API documentation

setup for PRODUCTION

# copy and modify the .env.prod file according to your needs
cp .env.example .env.prod
# copy the user-groups.example.yaml and modify it accordingly
cp user-groups.example.yaml user-groups.yaml
# deploy the app
make prod
# check it's running by calling the health endpoint
curl 'http://localhost:8004/health'
# > {"status":"ok"}

now go to http://localhost:8004/docs#/ and you should see the API documentation

User, Domains, Groups, and permissions management

there are 2 ways to access the API

1. via an API token which has full control/privileges to archive/search
2. via a Google Auth token which goes through the user access model

User access model

The permissions are defined solely via the user-groups.yaml file

• users belong to groups which determine their access level/quotas/orchestration setup
  • users are assigned to groups explicitly (via email)
  • users are assigned to groups implicitly (via email domains) as domains can be associated to groups
  • users that are not explicitly or implicitly in the system belong to the default group, restrict their permissions if you do not wish them to be able to search/archive
  • if a user is assigned to one group which is not explicitly defined, a warning will be thrown, it may be necessary to do that if you discontinue a given group but the database still has entries for it and so
• groups determine
  • which orchestrator to use for single URL archives and for spreadsheet archives see GroupPermissions
  • a set of permissions
    • read can be [all], [] or a comma separated list of group names, meaning people in this group can access either all, none, or those belonging to explicitly listed groups.
      • the group itself must be included in the list, otherwise the user cannot search archives of that group
    • read_public a boolean that enables the user to search public archives
    • archive_url a boolean that enables the user to archive links in this group
    • archive_sheet a boolean that enables the user to archive spreadsheets
    • manually_trigger_sheet a boolean that enables the user to manually trigger a sheet archive for sheets in this group
    • sheet_frequency a list of options for the sheet archiving frequency, currently max permissions is ["hourly", "daily"]
    • max_sheets defines the maximum amount of spreadsheets someone can have in total (-1 means no limit)
    • max_archive_lifespan_months defines the lifespan of an archive before being deleted from S3, users will be notified 1 month in advance with instructions to download TODO
    • max_monthly_urls how many total URLs someone can archive per month (-1 means no limit)
    • max_monthly_mbs how many MBs of data someone can archive per month (-1 means no limit)
    • priority one of high or low, this will be used to give archiving priority
  • group names are all lower-case

development of web/worker without docker

We advise you to use make prod but you can also spin up redis and run the API (uvicorn) and worker (celery) individually like so:

• console 1 - make dev-redis-only to spin up redis, turn off any VPNs
• console 2 - export ENVIRONMENT_FILE=.env.dev then poetry run celery --app=app.worker.main.celery worker --loglevel=debug --logfile=/aa-api/logs/celery.log -Q high_priority,low_priority --concurrency=1
  • or with watchdog for dev auto-reload watchmedo auto-restart --patterns="*.py" --recursive --ignore-directories -- celery -- --app=app.worker.main.celery worker --loglevel=debug --logfile=/aa-api/logs/celery.log -Q high_priority,low_priority --concurrency=1
• console 3 - export ENVIRONMENT_FILE=.env.dev then poetry run uvicorn main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --reload

Database migrations

check https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/tutorial.html#the-migration-environment

# set the env variables
export ENVIRONMENT_FILE=.env.alembic
# create a new migration with description in app/migrations
poetry run alembic revision -m "create account table"
# perform all migrations
poetry run alembic upgrade head
# downgrade by one migration
poetry run alembic downgrade -1

Release

Update the version in config.py

Make sure environment and user-groups files are up to date.

Then make prod.

Testing

# set the testing environment variables
export ENVIRONMENT_FILE=.env.test
# run tests and generate coverage
poetry run coverage run -m pytest -vv --disable-warnings --color=yes app/tests/
# get coverage report in command line
poetry run coverage report
# get coverage report in HTML format
poetry run coverage html