Deploying the Doenet cloud services

The Doenet cloud services are available at doenet.cloud.

Most users can simply rely on that public server, but some institutions may want to set up their own instance of the Doenet cloud services. These brief instructions explain how doenet.cloud was configured.

Setting up the domain and DNS

I registered doenet.cloud with namecheap, where I chose Custom DNS and pointed to the AWS Route 53 nameservers.

On AWS, I created a Hosted Zone on Amazon Route 53 for doenet.cloud, and created MX records pointing to migadu.

The LRS frontend (or "gradebook")

The Doenet gradebook is an SPA, written in Vue.js, providing a nice UI for the RESTful API.

To build and deploy, from the gradebook repository, run

npm run-script build
npm run-script deploy

This is configured to deploy to an S3 bucket, which is served from CloudFront in order to get everything behind SSL.

There is some additional configuration for an SPA on the CloudFront side, specifically

• routing 404s to index.html,
• setting the "Default Root Object" to /index.html so that https://doenet.cloud/ resolves to the index page.

One could also configure the S3 bucket to /not/ be world-readable but it doesn't much matter.

The LRS backend

The LRS backend provides the LRS itself and is deployed on vultr at api.doenet.cloud. Deployment happens via NixOps.

Most users will access this API by using the JavaScript library, so I suspect few people will want to configure their own server. Once we have federation set up, this will be a more common desire.

I provisioned two machines on vultr; the machines are called database and webserver. I set them up using the NixOS image from the ISO Library, and then used vultr.sh to install a clean copy of NixOS onto the disk.

With Route 53, I created an A record pointing api.doenet.cloud to the IP address of the webserver machine. (This could also have been done via nixops.)

To deploy, the key material must first be unlocked via

git-crypt unlock

This will decrypt the .key files which hold passwords and shared secrets.

Then the machines can then be deployed via

nixops create -d doenet doenet.nix
nixops deploy

Note that this also builds the LRS backend via a nix expression.

It does not create the appropriate databases though. For this,

mongo 10.1.96.3/admin -u root -p PASSWORD
use lrs
db.createUser( {user:"lrs", pwd: "...", roles: [ { role: "readWrite", db:"lrs" } ] } )

The library

The JavaScript library is made available on npm.

Demo page

I'll put up a demo page soon, illustrating the JavaScript library.