DP|rEX VrAn

This repository contains an editor for collaborative maintenance of metadata for social media accounts. It is developed as the infrastructure of the data trustee for research on right wing extremism (VrAN).

VrAN is a sub project of DP|rEX and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Reasearch.

Features

Currently the following features are supported:

• View social media account metadata
• Change the displayed metadata fields
• Create new metadata fields
• Edit Data
• Upload batch data in .csv format and merge it with existing data, with automatic duplicate detection.

Running

You can run VrAN using docker compose. The following instructions use a single node Docker Swarm.

Setup Docker Swarm

1. Install docker
2. Setup swarm: docker swarm init

You can also edit the file located docker-compose.yml to use different ports than the standard 443 for HTTPS and 80 for HTTP (HTTP is only used SSL certificate renewal challenges). For more details how to edit the configuration please check the Docker Compose file reference Please substitute your values for patterns starting with a $ like $REPLACE_THIS.

1. Start a container running a registry: docker service create --name registry --publish published=5000,target=5000 registry:2
2. Create the secrets. you can either use the quick_setup.py script for setting up secrets or register the following secrets manually using echo '$SECRET_CONTENTS | docker secret create $SECRET_NAME -'

• vran_db_password contains the database password.
• vran_db_user contains the database user name.
• vran_db_name contains the name of the database.
• vran_pg_conf contains `vran_db:5432:$VRAN_DB_NAME:$VRAN_DB_USER:$VRAN_DB_PASSWORD
• vran_pg_service_file containing

  [vran_service]
  host=vran_db
  port=5432
  dbname=$VRAN_DB_NAME
  user=$VRAN_DB_USER
  

• vran_django_key contains the django secret key. You can generate it using < /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-64};echo;
• vran_redis_password contains the redis password
• vran_redis_conf contains requirepass $REDIS_PASSWORD

3. From the base directory of the repository run docker compose build to build the containers.
4. Run docker compose push to push the images to the registry.
5. Create empty directories:
   • /srv/vran/ssl
   • /srv/vran/contributions
   • /srv/vran/acme-challenge
6. Set your user as owner of the directories: chown -R ${USER} /srv/vran
7. Add a SSL certificate (vran.crt) and key (vran.key) while being in directory /srv/vran/ssl. you can create a temporary insecure certificate and key using

openssl req -x509 -out /srv/vran/ssl/vran.crt -keyout /srv/vran/ssl/vran.key \
   -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -sha256 \
   -subj '/CN=localhost' -extensions EXT -config <( \
   printf "[dn]\nCN=localhost\n[req]\ndistinguished_name = dn\n[EXT]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:localhost\nkeyUsage=digitalSignature\nextendedKeyUsage=serverAuth")

For proper credentials please use certbot or getssl 8. Run VrAN using docker stack deploy --compose-file docker-compose.yml vran 9. Check that VrAN is now accessible over HTTPS's default port 443 on your machine using a browser. 10. Navigate to http:127.0.0.1:8000 and login using the username admin and the password changeme. 11. Change the password and possibly the username in the django admin UI.

Development

There are two projects in this repository. A backend written in python and a frontend in TypeScript.

Requirements

Currently the only operating system supported is Linux. For the backend the project requires Python and poetry as a package manager. Please install Python with your distros package manager. Afterwards install poetry using pip install poetry.

Node is required for the frontend. You can find instructions on installing node at [https://github.com/nodesource/distributions]

Installing dependencies

• For the backend run poetry install from the root of the directory.
• For the frontend run npm install from the ui directory.

Preparing the backend

The following steps are required for the initial setup. You only need to run them once.

• Create an instance of the environment file by running cp .template.env .env
• Generate a secret key using < /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-64};echo;.
• Copy the secret key and paste it as the value of the variable DJANGO_KEY in the .env file.
• Set the variable VRAN_DEBUG to true in the .env file.
• Generate a local database by runing poetry run ./manage.py migrate.

Additional Services

You need to run a redis instance for managing task queues. The easiest way is to launch it in a container: docker run -p 6379:6379 redis.

Running

• Start the backend by running poetry run ./manage.py runserver.
• In a seperate shell switch to the ui directory and run npm start.